I'm the other side - the UX guy for hire. Like all design the problems occur when you ask a designer to step in towards the end of a project, when all the fund

I'm the other side - the UX guy for hire. Like all design the problems occur when you ask a designer to step in towards the end of a project, when all the fundamental mechanics are locked down. Good design can improve things at any stage. However, great design needs to tackle the whole problem: give me a problem, ask me to solve it. The most important thing for a UX designer is access to real users. Sometimes we can imagine it; often we can't. If we have to guess we might solve the wrong problem. Often, outside designers bring an unencumbered view: one nicely away from development talk and developer think. We can create UIs that work like humans think rather than the internal structures that drive the software. It is that lack of distance that often makes programmers the worse people to design UIs (and generally causes the tension).