Hey friend,
This is Design Current. A newsletter about user experience design.
It’s 2025. Designers shouldn’t be regarded as the people who just make things “pop” anymore. But respect isn’t given, it’s earned. We have to show that product design is not subjective.
How? By speaking their language.
In this newsletter, we’ll talk about how we’ve advocated for design, whether we were in-house or freelancing, or working at a startup versus a large enterprise.
Shifting the perception of design
The tricky thing about design is that it looks subjective. Color, type, layout—it can seem like dealer’s choice. That makes it easy for everyone to have an opinion, and for design to get reduced to picking what looks nicest.
But, as designers, we know there’s real psychology and reasoning behind design. There are reasons error states are red, or why certain brands lean on blue or purple.
Design isn’t just about aesthetics. It’s a way of achieving business goals by serving user needs. To make that clear, we put an emphasis on being concise when we present, and backing up our decisions with evidence.
Here are some things that’ve worked well for us:
- Leverage user research, usability tests, analytics, and best practices to back our design decisions
- Replace “I think this looks better” with “Users completed tasks 30% faster with this design”
- Document and share learnings consistently to build credibility over time
- Pull in real-world case studies, because “this worked for them” lands better than we’d like to admit
Speaking the language of business and product
We think of ourselves as advocates for users, but at the end of the day, we all work for a business. To gain influence, we have to connect design decisions to the things stakeholders care about.
That usually means metrics. Primary metrics (like revenue) may not move directly, but design can shift secondary ones that ladder up.
A few examples of metrics that we’ve used to measure design impact with our clients:
- Driving subscription conversions, which increases revenue
- Increasing user retention, which boosts lifetime customer value
- Reducing support requests, which lowers customer support costs
And when we present to stakeholders who don’t live in design, we think of it like a UX challenge. They’re our users, so we design the presentation around their needs.
- How do we show value quickly?
- How do we make the story easy to follow?
- How do we anticipate their questions and needs?
Building allies and relationships
On product teams, tension between design, product, and engineering is as old as time. It often shows up when goals feel misaligned, and each group believes their priorities should win. More often than not, lack of support for design comes from lack of trust.
That’s why, for Koi, it’s not only about what we do, but how we do it.
- We take time to understand others’ pain points, not just design ones
- We look for compromises that show we care about their perspectives as much as our own
- We build trust through consistency, so disagreements can be handled with empathy and shared commitment
And maybe most important: we try to be a good friend. Invest in relationships outside of the work, so we understand collaborators as people, not just coworkers.
Bonus: advocating for design systems
The first time we worked on a design system, we asked product teams to swap old screens for new components. The pushback was strong. To them, “consistency” wasn’t more valuable than shipping features. And we couldn’t prove the ROI.
That’s when we learned consistency alone doesn’t sell a design system.
To get buy-in, tie systems to business outcomes:
- Fewer design and dev hours → less duplicate work, more time for valuable problems
- Faster time to market → quicker launches, quicker responses to competitors
- Better user engagement → consistent patterns that improve retention
Most importantly, prioritize system work with clear ROI first. That’s how you build trust, and momentum for the system.
Respect for design isn’t handed out. It’s earned by showing up with evidence, speaking the language of business, and building trust with partners. When we do that, design stops being seen as decoration and starts being treated as strategy.
Thanks for reading! Until next time.
Anyi & Andrea
Cofounders @ Koi Studios
