Not ALL developers are capable of doing good UX design. Not ALL UX designers are clueless about technologies and the realities of software development. What we all need to do is grow up and work together. Look at the bigger picture. Imagine you are designing, implementing, and testing a new car. It requires a multi-disciplinary approach. And consider this, the whole Usability field was born of developers (purely developers) creating software that people were not able to use or hated to use. There’s plenty of this type “design” still out there.

The general population of users, including me as a UX designer, would appreciate developers/programmers/coders improving their UX design skills. This doesn’t just involve researching the topic but taking the principles and best practices of usability/user-centered design to heart and ACTING upon them, instead of just doing what’s easiest for you at every turn. This also includes taking a significant amount of time designing the UX (not designing while coding), even more time designing the UX than coding in some cases.

Unfortunately for developers who like to design their own user interfaces and interaction without outside input, that type of process is disappearing. Designing and programming are being divided into two separate specialties/fields for the reasons I mentioned above. You’ll have to choose which one you want to work in, and hopefully learn to collaborate with your designing or programming counterpart without throwing up your hands in frustration.

Don’t get me wrong — I appreciate having experts around to do a speedy job of wireframes and mockups, but I do wish these people would realize that they’re providing a service, not salvation. And I wish that for once I could hear a UX designer come right out and say he or she has no clue so instead of going on and on about “the principles of user experience”.

In order to deliver a successful product, everyone involved needs to work together, contribute, collaborate and meet business as well as user requirements. A UX guy is responsible for signing of on UI and UX but that doesn’t mean that a developer has no say in the matter and shouldn’t contribute or for that matter that the UI/UX guy shouldn’t take input from a developer.

A successful product will deliver 100% functionality requirements as agreed with business while making sure that user requirements have been met. Working together, as a team you may deliver even more value in terms of functionality which will win over your business and get your team a long-term commitment from them.

Don’t create barriers because of your titles. Realise that everyone has a responsibility and a circle within which to work in but build you relationships so that you’ll can make those circles intersect and thereby deliver better products.

I don’t mean to come on too strong. Close collaboration between UX and dev is really important when making great software, and User Experience is really the responsibility of the whole business, not just one person. But if you have a UX specialist on the team, it is ultimately their job to make UX decisions – just as it’s a developer’s job to make technical decisions.

You base your whole complaint on the scenario created by the manager here: “Hey Doug, how come you can’t do Feature X in the app?”

There is a well known term for that scenario, and it’s called “feature creep” and it’s a project managers worst nightmare. It means an increased scope, re-planing, re-scheduling etc. I’m not sure how you do project documentation at your firm, but a change in mid-development phase is pretty costly in man hours as all previous documentation needs to be changed/checked to make sure it fits the changes

I can definitively relate to this feeling: “That’s a bullshit response. I’m not a neutered incompetent mindless developer. If something doesn’t work or was forgotten, I can figure out how to fix it”. But there is one problem, and that is, do you have a full overview of what is required to do the changes? Probably not, and the bigger the project, the bigger the chances of this being true. Unless you have a complete overview of the project and/or access to all the documentation needed to get this, and also are aware of the quality guidelines and styles for these documenations you are probably causing more problems then you are solving.

UX is about taking a step back and asking yourself the right question: What does the user need to do on this page and how can we solve that problem? The problem being to display a feature or information in a way corresponding to a user’s mental model.

Just keep an open mind and think about it! At my last job, I didn’t mind coders coming up with small designs without my approval, often they were almost perfect. They thought it out, that’s all I wanted.