Yes, that's the mistake most people make: back-end is engineering, front-end is art. No wonder we have such shitty front-ends. Sure, there are a whole slew of

Yes, that's the mistake most people make: back-end is engineering, front-end is art. No wonder we have such shitty front-ends. Sure, there are a whole slew of "applications" that will suffice with a basic form-driven UI accessing a rails or servlet back-end. And indeed there are applications like twitter where the entire complexity is in the complexity of the back-end. But then there are all the apps that simply aren't web-apps yet, because nobody has figured out how to do complex, rich, and above all Interactive, applications using fucking javascript. We're getting there, but people are writing the code to do it as I type (jquery, backbone, etc). So this is why UI is hard: its art and its engineering. And nobody thinks about the engineering part. And when they do, they have to find an engineer who can talk to the designer without scaring him/her (very often "her").