I don't think "technical" vs "nontechnical" is quite the right dichotomy. Perhaps "familiar with our conventions" vs "not" is a better distinction. Usually wh

I don't think "technical" vs "nontechnical" is quite the right dichotomy. Perhaps "familiar with our conventions" vs "not" is a better distinction. Usually when we say someone is tech savvy, what we mean is that they are familiar with our iconography and vocabulary, and know or can guess at the magical keystrokes or settings to make the software work the way they want it to. They may actually be technical users, or they may simply be "normals" with experience. An example: a friend was heading up the alpha test team for Sid Meier's Civilization IV, and invited me to join. I was the only tester without previous Civ experience. At one point I expressed my frustration with not being able to view certain information except when the game popped it up. The other testers and devs were surprised that I didn't know to press F5 through F9 to bring up that information. The devs added buttons for those screens to the GUI in the very next release, with clear icons and helpful mouseover text, and my user experience was much improved. Point being, the thing that gave me trouble wasn't being "non-technical", but inexperienced with the particular conventions being used. The challenge in UI design is to figure out conventions that both experienced and new users will be able to understand, and to replace conventions that new users struggle with. The only useful piece of advice I have is to make sure you have some testers who can compare your product to others like it, and other testers who have never used anything of the sort, so that you can see what conventions people from each camp struggle with.