Why should UX design with business goals in mind?

Why should UX design with business goals in mind?

Business goals are often not seen as human centred. Sometimes they’re even at odds with what we as designers are trying to to do. But without achieving our business goals the project will, eventually, stop existing

For years we’ve been the champions of our end users in businesses the world over. But with our new seat at the metaphorical table comes a pile of goals and KPIs that seemingly conflict with our human centered approach. Why should we care?

The core of any business is the same as in any good design: there’s a human with a need, and they want help to fill that need. With a good offering humans are willing to hand over money for that service. This is not in conflict with design values, on the contrary!

We should embrace the fact that we’re filling an economic need for our users the same way we embrace the humanity of our users. We as designers might not always understand everything up front, but we empathise, research, and eventually, we start to understand how our users think.

While we do this we understand our users better, but we can also start to understand our organisation better. With new insights from users we might be able to help our organisation design better business goals. Aligning business goals, with user needs, creating win-win situations!

We just have to remember that the executives and sales people have been working on this for years. And while we have different tools and techniques, that does not imply our are necessarily better.