We've been repeating this line for a line time now, but I'm not completely sure it applies.

I used to work for a big computer manufacturer from China working on their website. I worked hand in hand with designers making intranet apps, product description pages, landing pages, e-commerce, etc. We used to think like that, that users don't know anything about computers, so we focused on values, aesthetics, obvious features and price when designing product and landing pages. But one day a VP of e-commerce dropped by and said that A/B testing was showing that landing pages with technical data like processor power, RAM, disk size were working better than bare shiny pages. It turns out users are becoming more tech savvy every day.

So from that day on, whenever I think "yeah but a common user wouldn't do that" I try to get some evidence to back it up. People adapt and always surprise us.

> But one day a VP of e-commerce dropped by and said that A/B testing was showing that landing pages with technical data like processor power, RAM, disk size were working better than bare shiny pages. It turns out users are becoming more tech savvy every day.

It would have been interesting to do further testing to determine whether a page with nonsense words that looked technical did as well as tech specs. There is indeed evidence that consumers _like_ tech specs, and especially they like _larger_ tech specs; hence the race to increase megapixel counts, even at the cost of quality, and AMD's "Pentium equivalent" numbers (at a time when the Athlon 64 did more work per cycle than the P4, AMD would give a number intended to compare to the P4, rather than the chip's actual frequency).

There is, however, very little evidence that the user has the first clue about what the numbers _mean_.

That really doesn't have anything to do with what I said. Whether users can or do understand technical details is orthogonal to whether they routinely think about or change operating systems and for that matter, swap other major "components", other than through purchase of a whole new computer. Usually, they do not.

Not my mother-in-law. She doesn't really understand what an OS is, but she understands a change in user interface.

She knows enough that an upgrade in operating system will change enough that she'll be confused all over again and be frustrated trying to learn how to use her own computer, something she paid thousands of dollars for.

I believe she is still on vista, and won't upgrade because she knows how to use vista, and that was painful enough.

She is, however, the most computer unsavvy person I've ever met that actually uses a computer.

Let me introduce you to my dad. He still thinks the computer is the keyboard, and the big box is just the power supply and the Compact Disc player he plays music with.

He runs XP. He uses IE, Hotmail, Messenger and even figured out how to sign up for Facebook on his own. Way back when, he learned some Word and Excel to track his DVDs and write his memories. Sometimes I believe he is reasonably savy for an old, non-tech person.

Then I remember the time I moved his "internet" icon to a different spot on the desktop, and he freaked out because the computer didn't work anymore.