Designing for the Digital Age: How to Create Human-Centered Products and Services

Chapter 5. Understanding the Business

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. This means every project should begin with understanding what the product or service is meant to accomplish. Is it primarily intended to build brand equity, reduce operational costs, or generate revenue? Blue-sky design won't be helpful if the tool is only meant to save the company $100,000 a year, but may be just the thing if it has the potential to bring in tens of millions. Why is the project important? What's driving the launch timeline? How ambitious a design is the organization capable of digesting? If you'd like to see your design make it out into the world instead of gathering dust on your shelf, these questions and many others about the business should be your point of departure.

Understanding the business starts with stakeholder interviews. As discussed in Chapter 2, stakeholders are the people in your organization (or your client's organization, if you're an outside consultant) who fund, build, test, market, sell, and support the product, plus anyone else who will influence the product's direction. Who these people are varies from company to company, but the most influential are usually a product marketing or product management ...