I always thought a web designer was someone who knew HTML, a Mac UI designer was someone who knew ObjC and XCode, etc. But apparently it's now normal for a professional 'designer' to be an artist who just knows Photoshop, who then hands over to a programmer who recreates the whole design from scratch in code!
When I read this I remembered when few years ago DHH(also from 37signals) was talking that there is no place for the "The Idea Guy" in today's companies.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
UX design tools and processes are definitely lagging behind right now. The annotated wireframe document created in Visio, InDesign, OmniGraffle, etc. is still the norm. The closest thing we have to a solid prototyping tool is Axure (<a href="http://www.axure.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.axure.com/</a>), but creating anything beyond the equivalent of clickable JPGs is kludgy to say the least.<p>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.