Most skillful people will tend to develop good taste and a sense of design in and around their own field of expertise. The Design of Everyday Things has helped people I know expand that sense beyond its original narrower confines to, as the title suggests, the world of everyday things.

The downside is that now some of them think they can instantly render a well-founded opinion on anything relating to design. Although that may simply be a corollary of the general phenomenon where experts in one field (and programmers and engineers may be the worst) think they possess the master key to critical thinking and problem solving in any and all fields.