Business has a fever, and the only prescription, is more design.

Design needs pain. Design doesn’t exist if there’s no pain to solve. When customers struggle to accomplish something, we call it a “pain point.”

We cure these pains by building solutions (for the sake of this post, I mean building software). The simplest solution is to grab something that alleviates the pain immediately. And that’s usually excel or email, the software equivalent of over-the-counter (OTC) meds.

Most business processes starts out as excel and email. They’re versatile. But like OTC meds, they don’t address the root cause, and they fail as problems get more complex. Excel and email provide temporary pain relief, not a cure.

Enter design: a specialized treatment for business and customer pains.

The problem is that design is also often used as temporary pain relief. When design is used to simply ship features without understanding underlying issues, it’s only treating symptoms. Reacting to metrics alone is why our interfaces are diseased with pop-ups, chatbots, and cookie banners.

For design to be effective, it must address root causes. This means going deeper than just shipping features and understanding why customers are disengaged, dissatisfied, or confused in the first place.

Design should also understand the business context that delivers the experiences. Design should treat systems, not symptoms.

Business has a fever, and the only prescription, is more design.

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P.S. Social media is the narcotics of software. This is your reminder to stop scrolling LinkedIn (finish reading this post first though).

P.P.S. AI has turned businesses into hypochondriacs.

P.P.P.S. The medicine analogy fails if we consider “delight.” Good design can be delightful, something that’s a joy to use beyond just solving a pain point.