Lack of experimentation might also be because they are afraid to break something. I remember my (completely non digital) parents being unusually good with their car navigation system. Turns out the sales rep had told them: "its impossible to break this system, just try and it will be ok", and so they had trial and errorred their way to understanding how it worked.
100%. All too often with our software it is too easy to break stuff in an unfixable (to a newbie) way.
Just an anecdote: I organised an Android phone for my gf's mother. After a lot of training, she was using it to send and receive photos to her family and loving having it.
If she took a photo and wasn't happy with it, she would want to delete it. In the Samsung gallery app (Galaxy S4), you long-press on the thumbnail of the photo, then choose delete.
Problem is, the thumbnail of the Album itself is actually the last photo that you've taken. So she has inadvertently deleted the whole album (all her photos) by accident twice now!
I can't blame her because the icon she is deleting looks exactly the same as the picture she's trying to delete, only the message is a tiny bit different ("would you like to delete this album?" versus the usual "would you like to delete this photo?"), easy to not read the last word of the message if you've seen it 1000x before and done it safely.
I blame Samsung 100% for these accidential deletions. These phones and software just aren't designed with the non-confident user in mind, and in my opinion that's a broken UI.
Deleting an album containing hundreds of photos is something so dangerous and something you'd probably want to do so rarely that such an operation should at least warrant an extra message saying, "you are about to delete an album containing $number photos, are you sure?" And why not have a recycle bin? There are many ways this could have been easily avoided.
I can totally understand why a user like that would be nervous about pressing buttons they're not sure about. Especially after accidentally deleting all their photos!
Also there's no way to use a better Gallery app, the camera app always uses the IMO broken Samsung Galley app to review photos, and there's no way to change that.
Unfortunately I can't tell her "it's impossible to break this system" with that phone. I wish I could.
Sometimes I think that I'm just lucky I didn't have an experience like that when I was first starting with computers, because I might have been so scared after that that I wouldn't have continued to explore and learn. Nowadays I basically think that there's no problem with computers that you can't fix given the time and motivation.
