[agent327]

There is an implicit assumption here that developers have a better understanding of these issues than the rest of the people involved. My experience is that many developers are clueless about UX in general.

Source: I'm a developer, and I work with other developers. On my team I'm the only person who has studied UX design, which resulted in me getting considerable praise for the quality and useability of my user interfaces. At the same time, I have seen my colleagues design interfaces by literally adding controls to a window in the order they implemented the features, starting in the top-left, and moving slowly down the page in a row by row fashion. Well, that's also a strategy...

The real problem is that most designers just like drawing pretty pictures, and are clueless about UX as well. Pushing that to developers is one option, but it's really a separate skillset.