“Let’s be plain about it: Design is business. We can’t go on with suspicious…accountability. Designers, who excel at making hard things easy to understand through an interface, need to be part of the business discussion. Giving them Word docs and telling them to “make it look good†won’t cut it anymore. There is no accountability there, and worse, at that point much of the potential for really giving users what they need is already lost. If the Word doc is garbage, then no matter what the designer does will fail. Garbage in, garbage out. The scope of possibility is cut down to a narrow fraction of what it could be…of what the designer could come up with if they only had some time to think about how the strategy affects the design. As Peter Merholz says: Experience is the product.”