Dancing Without A Partner
37signals.com
37signals.com
Newer/hip startups don't do this, they use designers who write HTML/CSS, like the rest of the world.
There is also a big different between a user experience architect and an art director. The UX architect plans the system to meet the user and business needs (with an understanding of the technical ramifications of interaction design decisions). An art director works in photoshop to create the visual style. Again, on a small product team, it is likely that these roles will be carried out by the same person.
Programmer contempt for 'designers' often seems ubiquitous. Maybe it is only until they have worked with a proper professional.
Similarly, that is what I think about software/web designers not been able to implement their own designs, due to the lack of knowledge about programming. You don't need to be an expert to implement them. All you need is a basic knowledge of the platform for which you are building the design.
I realize that acquiring this knowledge may be difficult, and it may take some time. The same goes for programmers who don't know how to design the interface of their products. They don't need to become experts but they can teach themselves the basics. I was in such situation with time and experiments my designs improved, but I am not an expert.
To sum up, "Dancing Without A Partner", you don't need a partner for this dance, you just need to learn a little hip hope and turn on the music, everything else its just an excuse for laziness.
Kids fresh out of HCI and interaction design school are close to useless, because they have no experience having their designs developed. Seeing them interact with (frustrated) seasoned developers can be very painful. UX designers should learn enough about programming to be dangerous for many reasons, but hand coding prototypes probably isn't ever going to be a scalable answer. I fantasize about working on a next gen UX prototyping tool all the time, but, to use the article's metaphor, I don't have a dance partner for that.
I am a UX Designer who can code (Rails, Javascript, CSS etc.) and it embarasses me when I talk to others that are just 'wireframe monkeys'. If you don't know HTML how can anyone trust your designs?
I can only take so much - UX people need to step up and LEARN this stuff. If you don't you will just pave your own path to irrelevancy.
If it were up to me there would be some other way to describe UX ppl that know tech and those that can merely hit something with the pretty stick and leave devs scratching their heads...