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Comment by thewebguyd | Hacker News Reader

> They were too scared and/or uninterested in computers to even try and find any rules or consistency in it.

Yes, and this is still true today. I work for a company with a large very non-technical user base. People absolutely will not explore, click on things outside of what they have memorized, or even try basic troubleshooting steps out of fear of breaking things.

It's actually really frustrating when trying to train to certain software or concepts because you have to lay everything out very explicitly, step by step. You cannot leave anything to the imagination or just assume that because the UI is "intuitive" that they will figure it out, because they won't even try.

I've encountered some form of that attitude and behavior at nearly every job I've had.

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> People absolutely will not explore, click on things outside of what they have memorized, or even try basic troubleshooting steps out of fear of breaking things.

I agree with this in general but it can be tough for financial/business/order workflows where an irreversible change may be initiated. From the software perspective an audit log or Git-like history would easily mitigate these concerns but they usually don't exist. And "non-technical" users often just want to "know what buttons to click" to do their job.

To the point of the main article don't think I ever had the opportunity of using Windows 2000. Remember jumping from 98 to XP? Not sure about ME/Millennium either and if it's the same or a variant of 2000.

Not the same. ME also came out around 2000 but was based on windows 9x, windows 2000 was based on NT. The UI looked somewhat similar with those two.

> From the software perspective an audit log or Git-like history would easily mitigate these concerns but they usually don't exist

Yeah, and this is definitely a big reason why people are afraid to click and explore.

I still don't understand why big enterprise software still lacks any kind of version control. AUdit logs, yeah, but most big ERPs and other similar products don't have an easy "roll back this change" feature.

I think users knowing that they could immediately undo whatever they did and get back to a safe and known state would do a lot to encourage exploration and learning.

I agree. Every action should be reversible. If an action is destructive and cannot be reversed, it should have a clear warning. In an ideal world, this would apply to all software.

> You cannot leave anything to the imagination

I don't know if there's ever going to be a suitable environment to have this conversation, but many people in any society are just not smart enough to experiment with things especially if those things are non-physical or abstract.

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