I consider myself to be a programmer and a designer, and while my education has mostly been focused on programming, I have taken a fair share of art and design courses as well. Everything I have learned and done leads me to the same conclusion that Mark makes: good programming and good design are not very different.

What the article is not saying is that being a good programmer will give you good design skills. (Usually it's inversely correlated.) But both programming and design require logical thinking, abstraction, and creativity. They both take practice and a certain mindset. While programmers use data to model software, a designer will base their decisions on what's best for users.

The key point of this article is that as a programmer, you can (and should) start thinking about your design from the user's perspective. Focus on what's best for the users, don't compromise there, and then worry about implementation. It's a recipe for success.