I just read this on the sample chapter from Don’t Make Me Think:

My favorite example is the people (and I’ve seen dozens of them myself) who will type a site’s entire URL in the Yahoo search box every time they want to go to there—not just to find the site for the first time, but every time they want to go there, sometimes several times a day. If you ask them about it, it becomes clear that some of them think that Yahoo is the Internet, and that this is the way you use it

This is so true. I was not around when my mum learned how to use the internet on her own - without anyone else to learn from. She used to open the firefox application and the default page was the google start page where she types in the name of the website she wanted to visit and then go there.

Or, she clicks the drop down arrow on the address bar and scrolls down to the page she wants to visit.

Of course, I taught her the easier method :) and the concept of bookmarking.

I have also noticed people who do not know what to do with “bold” links - they have no idea that it is a link unless you put the “underline”.

The point is, we designers are so wrapped in our own world that it is a shock when you see such people who use websites in shockingly different manner than how “we think” they should be.