Funny how many "blame the designer" comments I'm reading here. I'm a UX designer very accustomed to dealing with the kinds of feature creep issues Jared address

Funny how many "blame the designer" comments I'm reading here. I'm a UX designer very accustomed to dealing with the kinds of feature creep issues Jared addresses. Allow me to give you my perspective. Given the opportunity, any competent interaction designer will give you a great user experience, IF they've been allowed to practice User Centered Design (user research and modeling, rapid prototyping, user testing). That's a big "if." In reality, we have to balance user needs with business drivers (mainly keeping up with competition), marketing, technological constraints and of course legal and compliance. Each situation is different, but most of the time, whoever holds the purse strings gets final say. The end user almost always gets thrown under the bus. Oh, I scream and holler and hold up extensive research to back up my rationale. But ultimately decisions get made by risk-adverse middle-managers who are more concerned with protecting their department's status quo than actually taking their customer's real needs into account.