I've seen non-technical users balk at long, confusing URLs, but I've never seen one of them praise or even remember a short, semantic URL. From the few non-technical people (mostly family) who I work with on a regular basis, URLs are just things to click on to get somewhere. Some of them are confusing.
Having semantic, discoverable URLs is awesome for people that think in terms of URLs. It's kind of a non-issue for people that don't.
URLs have never been for users. Users don't care how your application works. They just want it to work. URLs are for developers. We have links to abstract away URLs for users. But that doesn't mean developers shouldn't think in terms of URLs. Users also don't care about database tables and data normalization, but that doesn't mean developers shouldn't.
A subset of users care about URLs when a hierarchy exists. I've seen it happen during usability testing. /projects/25/tasks shows the tasks list... and I've watched the user delete the end of the url to get to /projects.
Most users don't care, but there are advantages to a clean hierarchical URL scheme, and it's one reason I like how Rails does routing currently.
I've seen non-technical users balk at long, confusing URLs, but I've never seen one of them praise or even remember a short, semantic URL. From the few non-technical people (mostly family) who I work with on a regular basis, URLs are just things to click on to get somewhere. Some of them are confusing.
Having semantic, discoverable URLs is awesome for people that think in terms of URLs. It's kind of a non-issue for people that don't.