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Comment by hnsmurf | Hacker News Reader

This is interesting but entirely useless. Though he's never used a computer, someone already has used this one and changed some things about it.

#1 IE defaults to a blank page in what appears to be private browsing mode, rather than Bing as it does on any new windows install. He's somehow running IE on a Mac which may be why.

#2. Someone checked out San Francisco Yelp on Chrome and as a result there's a link for it.

#3. "We shouldn’t assume that new users will inquisitively try and discover how new software works by clicking buttons and trying things out." That's probably misleading for 99.99999% of your audience. Yeah, the one adult on the planet who never used a computer before might be scared to death to play around with it, but you shouldn't design with that in mind (unless you're somehow aiming a product at them, in which case good luck with that sir). Put a 7 year old on a computer and he'll figure out how to find a restaurant in 10 minutes.

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* but you shouldn't design with that in mind (unless you're somehow aiming a product at them, in which case good luck with that sir). Put a 7 year old on a computer and he'll figure out how to find a restaurant in 10 minutes.*

To a point, maybe. Could that 7 year old figure out how to install lynx and find a restaurant at a blank console by reading man pages? Probably not.

Try to remember your first time using a computer. My early years were spent using a C64 to play games off of floppy drives, and I still remember the explicit steps: LOAD "*",8,1. I have no idea what that did, and treated it like a black box. Do not stray off the beaten path, for here be dragons.

Actually, I find that quite a lot of people who are even moderately unfamiliar with computers (by HN standards) tend not to explore or experiment with new tools or UI paradigms. It might be because they're afraid to break things, but I think it's just because their unfamiliarity gives them anxiety and for them it's easier and more comforting to simply turn the damn thing off and forget about it rather than plow forward and get even more lots and confused. Kids tend to be more curious, and more used to being unfamiliar with things. I wouldn't take that as representative of techno-illiterate adults.

I think that its more of a generational gap. People from previous generations were raised with the "measure twice, cut once" mentality, because when you're cutting things or drilling things, mistakes are irreversible. It's very hard for these people to get used to a "Control Z" mentality. In contrast, people from 1990+ generation have grown up with the trial and error mentality.

I agree on #1 and #2 but not on #3. I used to run computer training for people who'd never used a computer before, and I'd say the majority were not very adventurous (a few dived in). I think there's a sense that computers are valuable and can 'crash' and so they try not to do anything to break the machine

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