While every design project is underpinned by a significant business goal—like increasing Customer Lifetime Value (LTV)—a designer’s moment-to-moment focus often shifts away from that high-level metric. When tackling a project, the designer must first understand the primary business objective. However, once development moves to the individual screen or component level, the focus narrows to optimizing the immediate user experience. The macro-goal (LTV) informs why a screen is being introduced, but the micro-goal (usability) dictates how it should be built.
When a designer is building or refining a specific element, such as an interstitial drawer for upselling in an e-commerce flow, their guiding principles are focused on minimizing friction and maximizing utility, rather than explicitly calculating the LTV impact.
Usability and Flow: The primary goal is to make the experience pleasing and incredibly usable. For an upsell drawer, this means ensuring the user can easily understand the related product options and quickly add them to the cart.
Contextual Relevance: Products offered must be logically related to the main item and ideally require minimal customization, making the decision process fast and effortless.
Anticipation of Need: The design should integrate products the user likely needs or would purchase elsewhere, presenting them as a convenient addition now. The goal is a seamless, value-adding moment.
Non-Detrimental Implementation: For surrounding screens (like the Product Detail Page or PDP), the focus is on mitigating negative impacts. Does the new element (the upsell drawer) visually or functionally break or detract from the existing layout?
UX Metric Optimization: At the component level, the direct goal is often simply to “make it better” or “make number go up” in terms of specific UX metrics like completion rate, time on task, or error rate. For a shipping phase, optimization for LTV means making the information entry process as effortless as possible.
The design process operates on two planes: the strategic and the tactical. The strategic focus is on the business goal (e.g., LTV), which guides the overall initiative. The tactical focus is on the screen-level execution, where the guiding principle is optimization of the user experience. By ensuring each micro-interaction is efficient, delightful, and non-detrimental, the designer indirectly and powerfully supports the high-level business objective. The collective success of these small, optimized user experiences is what ultimately drives the desired increase in LTV.
Would love to hear from others whether this Macro/Micro focus on goals is something they’ve practiced as well:
How often do you actually think about the Business Goal when designing visuals?
Do the different focus’ on goals align to different roles?
Do you have difficulty switching in/out of the design goals?
Is there any terminology that you would disagree with here?
Being aware of the levers that shape an outcome comes from practice and repetition. After a designer has done it enough times, they can stop fixating on the exact LTV impact and focus more on what they’re trying to create. It’s so easy to get lost in the abstract with design.
LTV is just how you measure the effect. Knowing how LTV impacts the outcome as a KPI is a better way to shape design decisions than relying on the pure metric. The lift will ultimately be created by the interactions that are created. That’s design intent, but with business considerations.
“By ensuring each micro-interaction is efficient, delightful, and non-detrimental, the designer indirectly and powerfully supports the high-level business objective. The collective success of these small, optimized user experiences is what ultimately drives the desired increase in LTV.”
I think this is where many new designers get it wrong. Without thinking about the direct impact, delightful is fancy for I polished a button. Delightful still has to show viability.
I whipped together a post. It’s easy to get lost in the micro discussions- at a meta level, design has to always keep the user needs and business goals aligned. At a micro level, I think it just becomes a habit.
I think you’re right about habit and repetition. Muscle-memory for accounting for the outcome is certainly developed over time.
The lift will ultimately be created by the interactions that are created. That’s design intent, but with business considerations.
This is where I think the business goal is connected to an initiative: launching features.
When accounting for a flow, the business goal recedes to the background until we’re thinking about the feature itself. In the example above, that feature is a drawer with upsell opportunities, but it’s only a single screen in the flow that needs to be accounted for. Perhaps we think about upsell opportunities in the cart over view as well, but otherwise it’s optimization and fine-tuning.
Totally agree. The business goal sets the intent, but most of the lift happens in the tiny interaction decisions.
Once a designer has done this enough times, connecting the two becomes a habit. You hold the business goal at the initiative level, then move into the flow and refine the moments that actually create the outcome.
Here’s where I’d caution designers though- business goals aren’t about selling all the time (ecommerce has direct upsell in this scenario), but maintaining an operating system of design choices, which carry their own constraints and challenges. Internal and external decisions are always in tension.
While many designers don’t have direct business experience, it’s helpful for designers to learn these patterns to integrate into their decision-making.
launching features.