[mootothemax]

I disagree. If you just focus on coding, you will miss key usability issues that a good designer wouldn't miss.

And if you hire a UX expert, undoubtedly you'll gain even more insight into usability. So what?

In the end when you do hire a designer, you will have to rewrite a lot of your code to fix these issues.

Why? I thought separation of logic and design was a near universal practise by now?

[egze]

Yes and no. By design I also mean interaction with the product, animations, etc. Animations that you've written for the first design draft might not make sense anymore with the new design. So new code required. So is for markup and JS code. If new design requires new elements on the page, this may break your JS that relies on certain structure.

[nknight]

Animations? Did I miss where every startup is now a game company?

Animations are an unnecessary complexity that get in the way far more often than they enhance UX. If you're doing animation in a first-pass UI, you're doing it wrong.

[randomdata]

> If you're doing animation in a first-pass UI, you're doing it wrong.

I have to disagree. If you are slapping in some animation eye candy after the fact, you are doing it wrong.

Animation's purpose is to explain the environment to the user. An environment void of animation has to use other metaphors to explain the surroundings, leading to completely different designs. At that point it is difficult to start to incorporate animation with real purpose.

It is not necessarily bad to design an interface without animations. Some computer systems cannot easily support animations. However, animations can give you some design liberties if animations are a core feature of your design; to add them later is too late.

[joelanman]

Just on your last point - it may be that usability issues are not simply visual, but relate to fundamental programming design choices. For example you may have decided to use tagging to categorise information, where people find another system easier in that context.