Timoni West is a web designer in San Francisco.
This is her blog.

We think the Mac will sell zillions, but we didn’t build the Mac for anybody else. We built it for ourselves. We were the group of people who were going to judge whether it was great or not. We weren’t going to go out and do market research. We just wanted to build the best thing we could build. When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.

Recently, in our industry, I’ve noticed a disturbing increase of the term ‘Visual Design’. It’s often used to describe a job title, or a step in a UX design process; ‘we’ve done the strategy, the product definition, the prototyping… now, let’s make it pretty with some visual design. We need a Visual Designer to do that’. This confuses and bothers me. So, rather than have a weekly debate about it on Twitter, I thought I’d pen a few words here to make my point.

…honestly, I don’t know a single good designer who would call themselves a visual designer, or what they do as ‘Visual Design’.

When you look closely at auteurs, what you often find is that their real genius is for the the assembly of creative teams, trusting the right people with the right tasks at the right time. Sure, they make the final decisions, but they are choosing between alternatives created by others.

As a technical woman, this is your introduction and the first thing you have to learn is how to get back up and walk right back into a situation where the likelihood of getting punished for participating is one. How you choose to react to this determines the rest of your career in technology. If it’s too painful you’ll retreat to management, if you can tough it out your career will be limited because the very tools you develop to survive have other social consequences.

…Overall it’s awesome to encounter other women because while you grow accustomed to quirks of a room full of men (the jostling, the chest beating, the pissing contests, the egos, etc.), it does get old. When another woman is thrown into that mix, you get to avoid the old script and reevaluate the dynamic so it’s more interesting. However, you and everyone else is accustomed to women in the facilitator manager role, not in the making technical decisions role. Typically your collaborative and directional contributions almost always fare better than your technical contributions. If you pay attention to those social cues, you may start to subtly pull yourself out of the rough and tumble technical decision making and retreat into the facilitation role. If you ignore the social cues, you have to assert yourself aggressively into the technical conversation and take some lumps. If you choose that aggressive path, you wil be even more alone because those likely less technical women in the room with you don’t have the expertise to back you up.

However, while surfers may be more trusting, online shoppers are 30% less loyal to online businesses than in 2007.
Author of the study, Dr Brent Coker, said the increase in online consumer trust is largely linked to the visual appeal of websites. “As aesthetically orientated humans, we’re psychologically hardwired to trust beautiful people, and the same goes for websites. Our offline behaviour and inclinations translate to our online existence. As the internet has become prettier, we are venturing out, and becoming less loyal.”
“With websites becoming increasingly attractive and including more trimmings, this creates agreater feeling of trustworthiness and professionalism in online consumers.

Have the UX team responsible for writing the PRDs. Product Managers should write MRDs, which do not go into detail about the feature/product. They should focus on the “problem they want to solve”. It’s the UX teams job to figure out how to solve the problem and document it.