Me: Wanna see this website I built this weekend?

Friend: Yeah, sure.

Me: I connected a bunch of APIs so you can snap a photo of yourself and get a recommended song based on your facial expression. Pretty cool, right?

Friend: *thinking* ... I think you should change the size of that button, and the colors are pretty bad, dude.

Every time I show my non-tech friends anything I get this kind of feedback :/

the end user doesn't give a shit about how you did it. all his concern is about how it looks and feels.

But we, IT guys, are used to IDEs which usually contains multi-windows and error logs, so we don't give a shit about how things should look.

Yeah, I get that. I guess I overrate my friends abilities to think beyond the normal stupid user, haha.

Thats exactly the kind of feedback you want from them

@nukaboy If it was an actual project, yes. This was more of a prototype I put together over the weekend. Maybe it wasn't clear enough. The UI literally consisted of one button and some text.

@simeg id like to see the prototype!

Seem like good honest friends to me. I envy you haha

UI speaks first even for a prototype, if you are showing it to a user

Why exactly do you call this guy an asshole for not having an technical background? You know that is totally valid.

People are not idiots just for that. This elitist attitude is quite disgusting. Exactly like the trend to call non technical people "muggles".

Can we not do this?

@Makenshi You don't need to have a technical background to be able to imagine that something someone built is impressive, regardless of some flaws.

I immediately had to think of Louis CK joking about airline passengers, "you're sitting in a chair, flying through the air, and you complain that the WiFi doesn't work".

Is not about technical knowledge, but about the fact that we lose our sense of wonder very quickly when we're exposed to new things, and that we're often unable to look beyond the surface of an experience.

@bittersweet Actually that is matter of perspective and opinion, isn't it? What OP did here is interesting on a technical level. But besides that, it's quite gimmicky and serves no real purpose.

Since the asked person was non-technical, he was simply not interested in the technical aspect. All he was left with was a gimmicky app with an ugly ui. Of course he will comment on what he sees from his point of view. He is no idiot for that alone. It's actually quite arrogant to insult him as he didn't see the "genius" of your creation.

It's also quite normal to get accustomed to things that become part of your everyday life. People use cars and don't really care how they work. And that's fine.

@Makenshi >and that's fine

I actually disagree here. I'm not an expert on cars, but still feel like: "damn, we as humans are pretty ingenious that we have all these ways to transport ourselves faster". You don't have to understand how the machine works to respect the long history of innovations and the hard work of engineers to improve on it.

It annoys me when people take it all for granted, and never realize that without all this scientific knowledge, skillful craftsmanship and peaceful cooperation they would most likely not even survive for long.

@Makenshi You have valid points, and I totally agree that the end user does not really care for how it works. It should just work and look great.

However, in this situation I specifically told my friend (who happens to be my best friend, so I'm allowed to call him an asshole) that I was showing him this feature that I built but he still insisted on criticizing the UI. Not even a "ha! It works" or "cool that it works, but very useless", just saying that the UI looks like crap.

It's like showing someone the house you built (not comparing my shitty project to a house) and they tell you the garage door has an ugly color. "Sure, but it's the house I wanted to show you... You asshole".

This is how my cs teachers reviewed my projects at the university . They never cared about code .

@simeg who cares about the button and colours! This sounds pretty cool, any link to the prototype?

Getting the wrong feedback means you asked the wrong questions. Common problem in UX engineering.

There is a difference between showing a friend and showing a user.

I'd expect friends to acknowlege that what I did was impressive.
Users, I'd expect to give random criticism. Experience has taught me that

There's a way to criticize someone. U start with some good points about someone's creation and then suggest the corrections. That helps a dev improve.

Richard Hendricks faced the same problem when showed his web app to Monica! 😂 You learn something new every day!

Sounds like the bike shed effect