Design isn't optional. It's business strategy.

The most expensive design decisions I’ve seen are the ones that get made in rooms with no designer in them.

Not maliciously, though. What happens is the decisions come up, somebody has to make them, and the people sat in the room make them with whatever they happen to know.

And sometimes there is no other way.

I watched it happen on a large product a few years back. The technology wasn’t being built around the user’s needs, it was being built around what the team was capable of building at the time. Every decision was a sensible one if you were sat where they were sat. The UI got more cluttered, and user needs quietly stopped being the thing that decided anything.

It cost them focus on the user, it cost them time, it cost them a lot of money, and in the end they rolled the whole thing back to the definition stage and redesigned it from scratch off the back of user testing. Everything built in between had to be undone.

Look, when I say design isn’t optional, this is what I mean. It isn’t a decision a business gets to make. Everything is designed whether a designer touched it or not, so the only real question is whether it’s being done purposefully, by someone whose job it is to understand the person using the product, or by accident, by whoever happened to be nearest.

And I’d say the fix isn’t the one people expect. It isn’t more designers in more meetings, which is usually how this gets heard and usually why it gets resisted. It’s that somebody in that room has to be accountable for the person who isn’t in it. Ideally that’s a designer, and in my experience it usually should be, but it’s not really an org chart problem. It’s that the customer had nobody representing them at the point the decision got made.

That’s why you hire designers. To represent the customer.

You already know what pain feels like

Because everybody does, as a customer.

You buy something that looked great in the photographs, and the first time you use it there’s a bit that doesn’t work. The lid doesn’t sit flush, the app makes you create an account before it’ll do the one thing you bought it for, the list goes on. It’s always some small piece of friction that nobody owned that really ticks you off.

But you don’t complain, you don’t write a review. You just quietly never buy from them again.

That’s the bit that should worry a business, because that customer walks off without ever telling anybody why, and the loss lands somewhere nobody’s measuring.

The objection, and my honest answer to it

The pushback almost always comes from finance, and I’ve got no problem with it. Design is a cost line and not a strategy line, and yes, it costs money. All true.

Here’s my answer.

Want something quick and cheap? It won’t be good. Get design wrong and you don’t have a customer. You have stock you can’t sell, or a service with no subscribers.

But designers lose that argument constantly, and we lose it because we argue it as a principle. Nobody in a finance meeting has ever been moved by a principle. They’re moved by a number, and the number is usually sat right there in the business already, it’s just that nobody’s gone and got it.

So go and get it. Take one product, one page, one form, and work out what it costs you when somebody uses it once and never comes back. Not the average customer value, the actual cost of the ones you lost, times how many of them there were last quarter.

Then find out who in the business owns that number.

If the answer is nobody, you’ve stopped having a conversation about design budgets and started having one about a hole in the business. That’s a much easier meeting, and a much harder one to say no to.

What it looks like the other way round

The clearest example I’ve got of it working properly is the James Dyson Foundation, where I was the lead designer.

The JDF lends engineering education resources and workshop boxes out to schools. The resources themselves were genuinely excellent. That was never the problem.

The problem showed up the moment we put the site in front of real teachers. They couldn’t tell what, or who the site was for. And once they’d worked it out, the way to ask for resources was to download a PDF, and then write an email.

Think about who that process was built for. A PDF and an inbox is the cheapest thing in the world for an organisation to maintain, so it made complete sense from the inside. It made no sense at all to a teacher with ten minutes to spare between lessons.

So we gave every resource its own page, so you could see what it was and what came in the box. We cut the request journey down to a single flow. And we built one form that pre-selects the box you’re asking about, so by the time a teacher lands on it, the decision they came to make has already been made for them.

Box bookings went up five times over. Resource downloads went up ten times over.

That’s the whole job, really. Find the bit that hurts, and take it off the person it’s hurting.

The other nine

This is the first of ten lessons I’ve pulled together from fourteen years of designing products for all kinds of companies, all shapes and sizes, mostly embedded straight into product teams. The full ten are:

1. Design isn’t optional, it’s business strategy.
2. Most businesses think they do design. They don’t.
3. Businesses do one of two things. Adapt, or fall behind.
4. Nothing is ever done
5. Chasing trends kills creativity
6. Design needs time for play
7. Tools don’t make designers better
8. Tools can build systems and open up what wasn’t possible
9. Most businesses underestimate research, testing, and their own customers.
10. AI will get more done. It will never give your team taste.

I’ve written all ten up properly, with the stories and the numbers behind each one. There’s a video version too, if you’d rather listen to it than read it.

So if you take one thing from any of this, take this one. Pick the smallest thing you own, find out what it costs you when it doesn’t work, and go and ask somebody about that number.

I’d love to know what you find.