Beyond Beautiful Design

The overlooked key to designing desirable products: Opportunity Discovery.

Product designers pour immense energy into making interfaces visually appealing and delightful to use. But beautiful design isn't the make-or-break factor for product success. Companies fail even with the best designers on board. Why? Because usefulness trumps all.

I learned this lesson early in my career. When I started out, I focused entirely on aesthetics—influenced by whatever was the latest trend on sites like Dribbble. But after 10 years across various companies, my perspective has changed.

The data backs it up too. Today, we know that 90% of startups fail. The number one reason (42%) of startups identified that a lack of market demand prevented them from gaining the traction they needed to survive.

Lucky for us designers! This isn’t our problem – PMs and Marketers need to solve this, while we focus on creating beautiful, usable interfaces. Conversation over, right?

Not so fast. Delightful design can’t offset products that fail to solve real needs. Usefulness sits at the core—the base of the product pyramid—supported by usability and delight. My experience taught me that our work as designers begins before rectangles are drawn. This is where the discovery process comes in...identifying those real problems worth solving before a single interface component gets “designed”.

The High Cost of Skipping Discovery

Apps like Yo and Clubhouse took off virally thanks to novelty and strong design. But the rocket ship growth soon crashed back down to earth. Without underlying usefulness, maintaining high retention is near impossible.

On the other hand, you have “ugly” sites like Craigslist and Ebay that dominate their markets for decades. The reason they are able to do that is they address must-solve consumer pain points, better than any competitor.

That’s not to say that Aesthetics are irrelevant - but it must build upon a foundation of utility.

Designers Have a Clear Role to Play

Before diving deeper, it's important to understand the distinction between product delivery and product discovery. Product delivery is the design phase - when user interfaces get conceived and mocking begins. It's what most people associate with a designer's core responsibility.

Product discovery happens much earlier, focusing on identifying target users, outlining problems worth solving, and determining what success looks like. It encompasses activities like consumer research, customer interviews, landscape analysis, and opportunity qualification.

While product managers traditionally lead discovery, designers have an enormous amount to contribute here. Our user empathy and design thinking approach can profoundly shape early strategic discussions. That deep understanding then carries downstream into delivery.

Our user research expertise provides critical insights into consumer needs and behaviors. We own the translation of opportunities into solutions. With involvement across the entire process, we can exponentially increase our value.

Unfortunately most designers I interviewed over the years just get handed requirements to execute, rarely questioning underlying assumptions or business goals. It’s an immense missed opportunity to meaningfully influence product direction.

So if providing more value to your team wasn’t enough, taking a more meaningful part of Opportunity Discovery can help set you apart from other candidates when applying for a job.

Rolling Up Your Sleeves in Discovery

Practically speaking, how can designers make this shift?

First, talk with your PM about taking a more active role in the discovery conversations, when product opportunities get evaluated. Apply your deep understanding of the user needs in order to bring a unique angle to the process.

Next, don't jump to designing features without exploring multiple alternatives. Brainstorm creative approaches beyond the obvious, always keeping in mind the opportunity the team aims to tackle, and what are the trade-offs of each implementation.

You can also conduct discovery calls - open-ended user interviews aimed at understanding problems and current solutions, don’t settle for just testing prototypes and usability.

And finally, commit to measuring business outcomes, not just design outputs like time-to-complete for flows. Tie the quality of your work to revenue and growth goals.

Not every project will allow deep discovery involvement. But embracing a spirit of curiosity and skepticism will set you apart from the visual executors. Products that solve real problems have a greater chance of making a positive impact on the people who choose to adopt them. Isn't that why we chose this career in the first place?