Designers are best at finding attractive looks. User Interface design (aka, usability) was a computer science specialty long long before it was a thing people with degrees that have anything to do with photoshop or color have been doing it.

I constantly see designers put out things that are non-standard and unintuitive (I work in the iPhone world). I don't want to hear any "no-true scotsman" about that how they're bad designers, they're not. "Design" people generally come from information display background, not interactivity design background. Interactivity was a discipline that came from ergo and HCI researchers, not design schools.

But usability is different than information display. They throw expensive, non-functional items out there all the time, as well as ridiculous control schemes that work like crap.

For this reason alone, ignoring designers, and at best working with a usability expert, could be productive, but worrying about people who specialize in visual appeal and just try to stick onto interaction design because it sounds good on a resume is a bit rich.

UX as a field sucks because too many people who were taught to make pretty things are putting on airs as if they have an education on making things that work well. Actual usability people (with training and all that) are gems usually. If you don't know how to do a usability study, with controls and all that, you're probably missing a few things to prove yourself as a user interaction designer.

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?

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.

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.