As I was sitting in a web design session today, I had a thought that we’re entering the age of the UX geek. What I mean by this is that we’re reaching the point where the user experience is the predominate hurdle to cross.

Where once businesses were launched by business people who could secure sufficient capital to build factories, web businesses have tended to be launched by programmers who had the skills and talent to build web applications. But the technology of web applications is getting easier and easier: a Ruby on Rails application is a small fraction of the effort to build a Java Enterprise application circa 2000. Meanwhile user expectations for interaction design are increasing. This means the major hurdle to be cross for launching a business is not raising capital or mastering technology, but designing a good user experience.

I wonder if we’ll see more startups launched by designers now.