[jamesbritt]

... and if you're a beginner any explicit sign or help indicating what to do next is very much welcomed.

What's interesting is the the OP's parents have been using computers for a decade. They're not beginners per se, but they seem (I'm guessing) to have internalized some UI artifacts from the Web of 10 years ago.

If this is the case then the problem is not helping people who are beginners, but helping people who have possibly stopped reconsidering the UI they are actually seeing and who instead are locked into habits they built up earlier.

[ams6110]

Neither of my parents (both college-educated with multiple graduate degrees) ever really "got" GUIs or the web. They learned computing with punch cards and later with teletypes and vt100 terminals. They were fine with DOS when PCs came on the scene, but just never really made the leap to graphical interfaces and the web. My dad in particular thought it was all a bunch of silliness and it actually contributed to his loss of interest in computing (he used to program Z80s in assembly to control laboratory equipment. He could also progam TI 980 minicomputers by toggling machine code in on the front panel. But he never saw the point of the web.