This article reminds me of two things I've observed in ordinary computer users:
1. Many users don’t understand how or where data is stored or even that it is separate from the application.
That is correct. My photographing neighbour keeps his photos 'in' Adobe Bridge, another neighbour keeps them 'in' Adobe Elements. They don't have a notion that those programs only offer a view on the pictures which are stored in some directory on their harddisk (they don't understand the hierarchical file system either). When they have to import photos from their camera or email a photo, they always do it from their photo cataloging program, never from the Windows Explorer.
Likewise, a few of my collegues think their texts exist solely 'in' Microsoft Word, and that the 'Internet' is the same as the WWW.
2. reversibility
One day I was helping a friend of a friend with transfering some texts over to another computer. We reviewed a text, by accident I deleted a paragraph and restored it promptly with Control-Z (undo). The person was looking flabbergasted at me: 'How did you do that?'. He told me that often when some part of his text 'disappeared' magically without apparent reason, he had to type it all over again. He didn't know that Word has an Undo. I told him he could benefit from a basic Windows and Word training, but he wouldn't hear of that. He did remember the Undo trick, however ;-)
Beginning with Windows 98, it has been more trouble than it's worth to try putting your files where you want them in the filesystem, instead of letting the application find a place for them. After I realized this, I tried putting My Documents on drive D - that didn't go so smoothly either.
I recently helped my aunt install a new scanner. She asked me how to send a document to someone. After exploring the driver software for a while, I adviced her to start the scanner wizard/pamphlet printer/photo editor/document manager, click "scan", click "email", and let Outlook take it from there.
1. Many users don’t understand how or where data is stored or even that it is separate from the application.
That is correct. My photographing neighbour keeps his photos 'in' Adobe Bridge, another neighbour keeps them 'in' Adobe Elements. They don't have a notion that those programs only offer a view on the pictures which are stored in some directory on their harddisk (they don't understand the hierarchical file system either). When they have to import photos from their camera or email a photo, they always do it from their photo cataloging program, never from the Windows Explorer.
Likewise, a few of my collegues think their texts exist solely 'in' Microsoft Word, and that the 'Internet' is the same as the WWW.
2. reversibility
One day I was helping a friend of a friend with transfering some texts over to another computer. We reviewed a text, by accident I deleted a paragraph and restored it promptly with Control-Z (undo). The person was looking flabbergasted at me: 'How did you do that?'. He told me that often when some part of his text 'disappeared' magically without apparent reason, he had to type it all over again. He didn't know that Word has an Undo. I told him he could benefit from a basic Windows and Word training, but he wouldn't hear of that. He did remember the Undo trick, however ;-)