What do I know about diamonds?

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The Guy Ritchie film Snatch opens with the voice of the story (a small-time gangster named Turkish) getting his hands on a diamond worth an impressive 16 million USD.

Most of the other characters in the film spend their time failing spectacularly trying to chase the incredibly pricey stone. After many of them meet their end, the diamond ends up in Turkish's hands in an ironic twist.

"What do I know about diamonds? I'm a boxing promoter", we hear him say during a flashback in the film.

A part of me feels a bit like Turkish as I sit here writing about this project.

What do I know about coding? I am a music producer and a linguist! Really, are they handing out IT-related content creation gigs to just anyone these days?

Actually, that's not it at all.

Yes, my world of music and artistry is very different from the world of software development. But what this means is my reactions and reference points are not the ones you would typically expect to see in a software development blog.

What better way to show the various moving parts of this project becoming intuitive and understandable to an outsider than to have an outsider talk about their construction?

When a product gets released and it makes contact with its users, its level of complexity receives many different kinds of reactions.

Users and consumers with a primary interest in simply getting things done come in a large variety of different kinds of minds and backgrounds. Their feedback may be more unpredictable and sound less technical, but it can be quite helpful and smart in ways the developer(s) did not expect.

Where experts and professionals will spot hidden flaws skilfully, outsider voices will focus on their user experience from their own perspectives. This will pay off if (and when) there is ever a flaw staring everyone else in the face... except the builders of the product.