I wanted to see if my dad knew what I actually do for a living, so I decided I would ask him a few questions. But what I came to find out is that you can be a regular internet user without actually knowing anything other than how to enter a URL and click on some links.
Me: Do you know what Firefox and Internet Explorer are?
Dad: They're search engines
Me: What? Where did you get that?
Dad: They're like Google
Me: [long pause] No. They are tools that you use to access Google.
Dad: Well how come Google comes up when I open them?
Me: Because Google is set as your homepage
I was amazed to find that my dad, a regular internet user, thought Google was a web browser (no, he wasn't referring to Chrome. I'll try to educate him about that in 20 years never). Will this experience have an influence in the way I design? Possibly.
I had intended to demonstrate that what I do (front-end web development) is actually an art by showing how some browsers render elements differently than they should *cough* IE6 *cough*, but once I found out that my dad didn't know the difference between Google and a web browser, I figured I'd save the lesson for another day.