People are not upright beasts whose only needs are food and shelter. People also might be perfectly well fed and healthy, but live in rural areas, or be elderl

People are not upright beasts whose only needs are food and shelter. People also might be perfectly well fed and healthy, but live in rural areas, or be elderly, or have learning disabilities. People who were once very poor can start receiving extra income (and that is particularly true in the BRIC countries) and gain access to computers. People interact with new interfaces all the time, and not all user interaction occurs with a computer. So, there definitely is a market for those complete novices. Regardless, understanding how people interact with new interfaces for the first time is interesting. Joe's case is only a single instance of this situation (and perhaps extreme, given the context). Every time a new interaction model is developed, the insights from such an experiment might prove useful.