Learning from students

One thing I am finding as my students try to access the site is that maybe we have taken too much for granted that they know how to navigate around a place like this. I am now trying to get feedback from them which I hope to incorporate when we are teaching others how to log in.
Some problems arise from my attempt to use groups in a sensible way, which of course is not a Moodle way. Since I had made some of my activities "Separate groups", they couldn't submit unless they were part of one - which they didn't know how to.
Also I found that some students were browsing through the course without actually having enrolled, which again was fine until they tried to see or submit an assignment or grade. My learning from that is that we should very much limit guest access to the courses - probably to zero!
They will always tend to click on the links without reading them - we should probably try to make better use of the site news forums to provide help with the different options in the course.
Some get the hang of it rather quickly, but I am worried that the learning curve will deter some students from using the site, so we must make sure they are all with us!