The journey to becoming a truly relevant designer in your organization is built with a deep understanding of business principles. For designers, grasping the nuances of business isn't just an added bonus; it's the key to career growth and maturity. Designers who develop business acumen are positioned to lead the future of our industry.
A Shift in Perspective: From UX to CX
As designers, we've long focused on solving product-specific user experience problems. However, the industry demands a shift. We must evolve into customer experience designers—professionals who can map the entire customer journey, identifying opportunities to improve the likelihood of someone choosing and staying with our product.
The challenge is clear: many designers remain overly preoccupied with visual design, motion design, or wireframing. While these skills are important, they represent only a fraction of the bigger picture. The surge of sophisticated design tools has made it easier than ever to produce polished designs, but this has created a troubling trend: bad design can now masquerade as good design. The hard work—understanding and solving customer problems—often gets overlooked.
The Bigger Picture: Designing Beyond the Product
It’s critical to recognize that most people who encounter your product will never become customers. Businesses lose potential customers due to poor pricing strategies, weak branding, ineffective marketing, subpar operations, and inadequate customer support. These issues aren't just business challenges—they're design problems.
Designers have the tools and mindset to address these challenges. Marketing, operations, finance, and customer support teams make decisions every day that shape how potential and existing customers perceive your product. By applying design thinking across these domains, we can drive meaningful improvements that benefit the entire organization.
Building Influence Across Teams
This doesn’t mean that designers should take over marketing, operations, or finance. Instead, it highlights the need for designers to influence decisions within these areas. The next generation of design leaders must prioritize building relationships across teams and spend less time at their desks.
To truly impact the customer experience, designers need to engage with:
- Business strategy: Understand margins, revenue models, and competitive positioning.
- Customer data: Dive into conversion metrics, feedback, and analytics.
- Operational processes: Learn where inefficiencies exist and propose solutions.
- Customer support insights: Listen to calls and pinpoint recurring issues.
The Mindset Shift: From UX to CX
Transitioning from a "user experience designer" to a "customer experience designer" is more than a title change—it’s a fundamental shift in how you work and how your value is perceived. This mindset change will:
- Improve how your company views design as a strategic function.
- Strengthen customer loyalty by aligning design efforts with customer needs.
- Drive higher returns on investment in design by addressing broader business challenges.
The Future of Design
Designers who embrace business thinking will lead the charge in transforming how companies approach their customer experiences. By bridging the gap between design and business strategy, we position ourselves to make lasting, meaningful contributions to our organizations.
If we aim to secure greater buy-in for design, we must demonstrate our ability to influence outcomes beyond the product. This evolution is not optional—it’s essential. The most impactful design work lies at the intersection of business and customer needs, and it's time for designers to step up and take their seat at the table.
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