The world’s largest company, Apple, rose to its dominance by using great product design. Steve Jobs famously said, “Design is not about how it looks. It’s about how it works.”

Most people confuse design with art. The main difference is that while design is supposed to be beautiful, at its core it’s about functionality, solving problems, and delivering results.

In other words, the function of good design is fundamentally tied to key business metrics, such as return on investment, conversion, user retention, customer loyalty, engagement, and so on.

By designing seamless user experiences, Apple escaped a price competition with the PC industry and became the largest and most profitable company of our time.

Today, startup ‘unicorns’ like Stripe, Slack, and Dropbox are setting the expectation that digital business products should be useful, usable, and satisfying.

Meanwhile, large organizations like IBM, GE, and Salesforce are prioritizing design as a competitive advantage by hiring thousands of designers to reshape processes and culture.