> No, I think in many projects designers are decorators - which leaves no one in charge of the user experience from the point of view of the user. I agree. Tha

> No, I think in many projects designers are decorators - which leaves no one in charge of the user experience from the point of view of the user. I agree. That's my experience in this industry, and in big projects. Designers are hired to make things look pretty. > In the same way that a full-stack Linux expert isn't going to understand how someone without 5+ years of command line experience approaches a computer, a trained designer with an experienced eye is always going to struggle to point themselves in the place of a naive user. ... but with this I can't agree. It's not a reasonable comparison. The full-stack Linux expert won't understand the user mostly because it's not his job to do so. He doesn't have the knowledge and methodology to get to know and understand the user (as well as his context). The UX expert, on the other hand, should be trained specifically to do this in the most systematic and unbiased way possible. He doesn't need exactly to role-play the user (frankly, I don't like this conception of UX, but that's a pet peeve), but he should know and understand him. It's not "I think the user will like this", it's "I know users want this". > Good UI needs to be tested for design assumptions and for user taskflow. The testing needs to be repeated every time changes are made. And in this we fully agree again. All the knowledge the UX expert can harness about the user and his context should be validated, as early as possible.