[arstin]

I think your comment about modeling is a good one. It actually fits with how I view UX design. I think it's no accident that the best UX designers, in my experience, tend to come from a psychology background rather than an art school one. (And also why so many great UX designers can be poor at UI design/branding!)

To the extent coding helps train you to think clearly about complex and---especially in this case---ambiguous things, it probably could help your ability to design. But! I've often been baffled why most developers, who should be good at modeling, are so often unable to transfer those skills to UX design.

The best explanation I've been able to give so far is largely that "modeling" is somewhat equivocal when viewed in terms of day to day work. Think about the very different skills, knowledge, values, habits of mind, etc it takes to construct a useful data model for a relational database, a predictive dynamic model of neuron populations, an evocative persona model of users, and so on. One neat observation here is that if you try to build, say, a persona in a similar form and with similar standards as a database data model it will be a disaster...unable to fulfill it's purpose. (Not disagreeing with your comment about ridiculous persona models here!)

IDK, this is cool to think about and there's a lot more to say but I'll leave it there.