UX Has Always Been About Business Value

When leadership says designers don’t understand business, what they’re really saying is they haven’t bothered to learn what design actually does.

Here’s what they don’t get: design without business consideration isn’t design, it’s art. Every design decision I’ve ever made has been in service of a business goal, solving a problem someone is paying the company to solve. The design is literally what customers touch and feel every day. It’s how your business delivers value.

This isn’t some fresh revelation designers need to discover. We’ve been serving business goals since Xerox PARC. Back in 2009, Kim Goodwin dedicated an entire chapter in “Designing for the Digital Age” to understanding business. The chapter opens with: “While we designers like to think of ourselves as advocating for end users, we’re ultimately responsible for helping our customers: the employers or clients who hire us to help achieve certain organizational goals.” Alan Cooper’s “About Face: The Essentials of Interaction Design” dedicates entire sections to business and organizational goals.

Want proof of this misunderstanding? The same executives asking “What’s the ROI of design?” are complaining that engineering is blocked because screens aren’t done. They want design to move fast but question its value. They treat designers like short order cooks while demanding strategic thinking. If you have to ask what the ROI of design is, you’re revealing your own misunderstanding of what design does, not exposing some gap in designers’ business knowledge.

This misunderstanding isn’t just insulting —i t’s expensive. When you exclude designers from strategy meetings then wonder why your product feels disjointed, you’re paying for your own misunderstanding. When you treat design as decoration instead of decision-making, you get products that look fine but solve nothing. Companies that “don’t see the ROI of design” are usually hemorrhaging money on features nobody uses, built by engineers who never talked to a user.

Here’s what this feels like from our side: You hire experts in human behavior and problem-solving, then ask them to move rectangles around. You bring us in after all the important decisions are made, then blame us when users don’t want the product. It’s like hiring a surgeon then asking them to just bandage up the patient someone else operated on.

So here’s my challenge to leadership: Stop asking designers to understand business and start understanding design yourself. Sit in on user research sessions. Learn what we actually do. Understand that when designers push back on requirements, we’re not being difficult—we’re doing our job. Because the truth is, we’ve always understood business. The question is whether you’ll ever understand design.