A friend of mine (Hi Emmet!) wrote something in a mail to me recently that I thought was worth sharing. He has an annoying habit of coming up with pithy epigrams, which makes me very jealous (and a slightly less annoying habit of flogging them to death afterwards, but let's not get into that).

Beginners are, by necessity, task-oriented. It is very hard for us techies to understand beginners, not because we know the stuff well, but because we're professional learners who have evolved a highly efficient personal learning methodology without even thinking about it. Our tendency is to present facts and examples. We structure information the way we would like it, not the way the user needs it.