Defining the novice user

Abstract

There are many research reports directed at establishing the characteristics and needs of new or inexperienced computer users, and indeed these have been the topic of at least three substantial review articles in the last decade. Most of these studies, however, make little effort to report carefully the defining characteristics of their samples beyond the use of intuitive and tautologous labels such as ‘expert’ or ‘naive’ and so on. Inevitably this leads to difficulties in interpretation and generalization of findings. The paper outlines some conceptual considerations in separating out terms applied to computer user samples and suggests a basis for a fuller reporting of sample parameters which would aid comparison between reported studies.