It’s been a rough stretch for all of us. When it comes to placing blame, late-stage capitalism has a lot of fingers pointing at it. Sometimes mine is pointed at it too, when it is not doomscrolling.

Yet, as a designer, I play a role in its cause and cure. I am a Creative Director who works with multi-national corporate clients. I lead UX and visual design teams employed by a publicly-traded, very-much-for-profit company. Which is to say, my colleagues and I are in the palm of the Invisible Hand. And lately, it feels more like a clenched fist, whose finger is pointing back at me.

This is an essay that expresses my own opinions and not the views of my employer–or my past or present clients–and is about how I am earning what I call an MBDA — Masters of Business Design Administration. It’s a self-taught, self-accredited, post-secondary degree in learning how to make design choices that are both equitable and unequivocally contribute to the goals of the corporations that employ me.

We all need help and education. To navigate the complexities and agendas of corporate business, I rely on what I know best: design. I am using design as a verb. In order to improve any experience, it’s required that designers understand who they are designing for. We need to appreciate their goals and understand the products and systems they use to achieve those ends. What gets measured gets managed the corporate adage goes. I say, what gets discussed gets designed.

So I’ll discuss. I’ll share with you what I’ve learned. Perhaps with a clear-eyed understanding of the basics of the corporate mechanism, designers can better navigate the business landscape and develop a stronger voice to improve their work and perhaps, the system itself.

“Want your users to fall in love with your designs? Fall in love with your users.”

— Dana Chisnell

Who is the User?

As a designer, you learn to ask it early and often. Who is the user? It appears to be a simple question. If you work for a publicly held firm and keep asking it, and you will arrive at a rather existential answer.

The prevailing design dogma goes something like this: good design matters because it makes users happy, and that translates to a variety of positive business outcomes. I profess, I am a card-carrying member of this sect. How exactly my fellow devotees and I will spread this gospel will vary. So will our success.

I am not alone.

My 350,000 or so fellow employees and I need to think through this story a bit further. “Happy users create positive business outcomes” is a true but incomplete tale. This hymn is missing the final verse. It is important that you don’t put this book down too soon. With a complete reading, you will discover happy customers create positive business outcomes — which will yield returns for shareholders and investors in the firm. This is how corporations work.

At a recent count, the S&P 500 alone employed over 27 million people. I am not the only one among us whose employee badge reads User Experience Designer. Most designers are not well-read in the melodrama we call corporate business structure. We instead work hard to identify and understand these individual characters but can miss the main plot. We study the customers, employees, partners, patients, visitors, vendors, and even the competition. We interview them, we map their experiences, we obsess over their every whim and click. But for millions of designers who work at corporations, we fail to acknowledge our secular profession’s equivalent of the Holy Ghost of users: The Shareholder.

By not addressing the entirety of the corporate system and all people involved, we avoid addressing and understanding what is ultimately the single biggest factor in business decisions: providing the shareholder a return on their investment. This means we as designers may not be able to fully develop our work, and will not be able to properly communicate its value to business stakeholders.

When I began working for my current employer, conversations were difficult. At least they felt that way to someone who gets offended by bad kerning. I knew more about the tools of design than the commandments of shareholder primacy. Varnished yet unapologetic discussions of quarterly earning reports was, at first, off-putting for me and my Master of Arts degree.

Being uncomfortable can mean you are learning something new. It can also just mean the shoes you are wearing don’t fit. You can blame your feet or the shoes, but only one can change sizes. Either way, you gotta keep walking forward.

A brief history lesson in economics

So the question is, do corporate executives, provided they stay within the law, have responsibilities in their business activities other than to make as much money for their stockholders as possible? And my answer to that is, no they do not.

– Milton Friedman, “There’s no such thing as a free lunch” (1975)

When it was published in 1970, the Friedman doctrine was a defining moment in business and society. Milton Friedman was articulating what some had already come to believe: that a corporation’s sole responsibility is to its shareholders. But he expressed it well, and was in a position of intellectual and academic influence. People listened, and he has shaped the economic norms for the last 50 years. As someone very interested in UX, this specific point in history is remarkable.

In the middle of the 20th century, America’s definition and purpose of a public corporation was evolving away from an earlier era of managerial capitalism, which had become seen as bogged down by competing influences and bureaucracy. Put another way, trying to do “the right thing” for everybody is hard to do. Business leaders wanted focus. Eight years prior to the Friedman doctrine, an article in published in Fortune magazine quoted management of a US textile company, Indian Head Mills, expressing similar sentiments. It read:

The objective of our company is to increase the intrinsic value of our common stock. We are not in business to grow bigger for the sake of size, not to become more diversified, not to make the most or best of anything, not to provide jobs, have the most modern plants, the happiest customers, lead in new product development, or to achieve any other status which has no relation to the economic use of capital. Any or all of thee may be, from time to time, a means to our objective, but means and ends must never be confused. We are in business solely to improve the inherent value of the common stockholders’ equity in the company. (Source)

There is a lot of debate about the Friedman Doctrine, shareholder primacy, and the guiding principles and priorities of corporate America over the last 50 years. For some designers, I am providing a source to place some of your blame, other’s perhaps credit, for the state of affairs today. This is not the essay to expand this critique. (This article would be a good place to start for those who do).

This essay aims to acknowledge the paradigm that the millions of corporate employees operate within, one that I have found designers lack awareness and fluency in. If we can gain more, we can begin to better understand how the role of design can play a more meaningful role in business today and tomorrow. For me personally, I need to walk forward with the shoes I am wearing.

Tips for corporate designers

This very brief glance at history is concluded. It’s a look back over my shoulder only long enough to impart a few key concepts for UX designers.

1. The shareholder is a user

A UX designer’s purpose and responsibility is to improve a user’s experience with a product or service, to help users achieve their goals and accomplish their tasks. Shareholders use a corporation to generate wealth. Moreover, these users have been the primary and prioritized user group for publicly traded firms. Their goals are clear, and measurable. Understanding this will explain the majority of choices made by clients and stakeholders, and their leadership. These users place their confidence in the choices the business and its employees make, in order to achieve their goal.

2. The corporation is a product

Like any product, it has users. Customers, employees, and partners are interested and considered stakeholders, but without equity in the product, these personas are secondary — a means to an end. An important group to mention here is the persona I’ll call investment analysts, who study the product (the corporation) and the product’s position in its respective market landscape. This group is influential in determining the attractiveness of buying stock in a product according to a variety of factors.

These non-shareholder groups are compensated through their wages, commissions, and salaries (which in certain cases, might be stock options), or in the value of the products or services they choose to purchase. I recognize this might be heresy to some liberal-arts trained designers. Don’t hate the player, hate the game. But the game shows signs of changing. Stay with me, dear reader.

3. Practice empathy and understanding

Shareholders are people, lest we forget. Most shareholders are not C-suite ‘product owners’ who are compensated with equity. I am designing for our parents, aunts, uncles — and myself; anyone who has savings or a retirement fund. Institutional investors own around 80% of the market. Institutional investors are the managers of the collections of corporate stocks (and bonds) who make up public and private pensions, 401Ks, 403(b), and financial products that millions of citizens rely on. Your Grandma is relying on us. Isn’t that motivation enough?

4. Design for the future

Most importantly and most interesting, things appear to be changing. Pay attention to the shifting space where corporate business culture and design intersect. I for one will eagerly participate in this evolution. The shifting zeitgeist of America today seems to be waking up from the half-century of binge drinking on maximizing shareholder value. For many of us, we woke with a bad hangover.

In 2019, perhaps sensing the collective queasiness and pending economic and social pain wage workers have faced since, the Business Roundtable, made an announcement. The group is a collection of CEOs of the country’s biggest companies, and it officially declared it’s leaders would reevaluate their agendas to consider a wider range of stakeholders: shareholders, yes — but also (if not equally) employees, customers, their communities and the environment. Mr. Friedman’s rein may be yielding. To what exactly, is up for debate — and design. I believe UX design plays an important role in what is next. It might be our most consequential product redesign of our careers.

Looking forward to Human-centered Business

I might be biased, but I like to think that the ethos of Human-centered Design is beginning to inspire Chairwomen and men and their Boards of Directors towards Human-centered Business. New and promising strains of capitalism are taking form. If these shifts towards stakeholder capitalism and customer capitalism take hold, UX practioners will be well-suited to this era, and a wider range of people stand to benefit — including designers. As the distance between “designing for people” and “designing for the business” gets ever closer, business leaders will rely more on the skills and perspectives good designers can provide. Time will tell. Change is hard.

In the meantime, designers need to develop stronger business acumen. Sound UX research will continue to lead to a deeper understanding of all users and stakeholders. With understanding comes empathy. From empathy comes design efficacy and equity. With strong leadership, we can continue to iterate and improve on designing capitalism itself.

I’ll play the game with the shoes I’m wearing, and as uncomfortable and challenging as it often feels, I’ll keep improving my understanding of design, business, andthe people I design for. Step by step.

About the artwork in this article: Annual reports are a clear testament to the business–shareholder relationship. They are often wonderful pieces of design communication, both for their visual impact and as a representation of cultural currents at the time of their publication. This collection, and many others can be found at the AIGA design archives.

Further reading: