From svn:

Imagine if Information Architects and Designers worked together with Developers to create a working section or feature of a site. Wireframes can be part of that process but don’t have to be presented. The more real it is the better feedback you’ll receive.

Exactly on spot ! Only problem is, IA aren’t abundant in small companies, and designers end up doing that job, what (usually) leads to poorly thought features and interactions. Design is a visual process, and it’s too easy to look at that shiny polished look that’s appearing like magic on Photoshop and forget that what’s on screen is just a still, a frame from a bigger movie where the main character is played by the user.

Or, Developers take a shot at it, and being good faithful geeks they suffer from the reverse problem: everything is interaction, and every possible solution must be taken in to account, regardless of the look and interaction demanded from the user. We (I fit comfortably on the geek squad) end up making forms that present error messages on the wrong places, with non sequential fields and sometimes even loosing all the information the user just entered.

All this leads to frustration, with one (or more) of the following results:

• the developer that likes to have a polished look and feel, sees a nicely designed page that breaks conventions and is not easily expandable
• the designer sees his/her hard work completely trashed by a dumb geek that can’t see the difference from Helvetica to Georgia
• the user sees a waste of his/her time

Of course, we can work hard and try to make something good, designers, developers, and information architects (even the ones that perform this role in good will). But sometimes it’s hard…