24% Percent of Users Can’t Find Google
Over on usability guru Jakon Nielsen’s blog, he throws out a statistic that 24% of users in a recent study couldn’t navigate to google to perform a search - they either went to a different search engine or just failed. How you fail at that task is beyond me. Do you look at the browser, throw up your hands, and scream “I don’t know how to use the damn thing!!”.
I generally try not to be critical of non-tech savvy people, as I spend way too much time online and its only normal that things that make perfect sense to me can baffle other people. A couple of years ago a friend handed me a socket wrench when I asked for help on my car. He was amazed that I had no idea what to do with it - but hey, I had never done any work on a car engine, let alone even change the oil. It’s all perspective I guess. The scary thing about the study is this quote “Also, for this round of research we’re deliberately recruiting above-average users, so the success rate across all Internet users is probably lower than our finding.” If 24% of above average users can’t navigate to Google, then my perception of the web is way out of wack with the general population. I would have guessed in 1% to 2% range…