User experience design, or UX design for short is the buzzword these days, and everyone seems to be appending it to their skill sets, sometimes with an additional ‘expert’ at the end. The sad truth is that no one can design user experiences. Not even the so-called gurus.

While our clients, bosses or peers might not always be able to communicate effectively their opinions when giving design feedback, it is by no mean an excuse for us designers to put all the blame of a faulty communication on them. We are equally responsible, if not slightly more.

Few moons ago I had the chance to work on the UI of an iPhone application as a part of larger project. Unlike many fellow designers who prefer Photoshop to Illustrator for this kind of projects, I decided -after an educated guess- to go 100% vector. Few months later, the extra time I spent trying to get those inner glows to look right on Illustrator has paid off.

It would be hard to argue that there is no place for subjectivity in design. Unfortunately, this is the very reason that makes giving constructive design feedback a daunting challenge. Add to this the fact that not all of us are designers: sometimes we just feel that something is wrong, but can’t explicitly put it into words.