I worked in a lot of businesses as a product designer or sometimes UI/UX designer, In all these businesses I always had an insurmountable challenge and I think that challenge is facing all product designers and Product Managers.

And the question is: how much do we need to care about product visual design, is the UI important for businesses? if yes, why Amazon.com UI design is ugly but has the most sales in the world?

Can it be concluded that design is not important in business? In this article, we will examine this issue and examine the reasons for the importance of UI Design in product development.

Which type of business you are designing for?

An important thing that designers usually do not consider is the type of business model of the product. The type of business model is very important, not only for the UI design but also for knowing what kind of system design we need or do we need a design system for our business.

I think we have two types of business models in online services:

• Transaction Base: The business earns money by selling the product or service based on customer purchases for example Amazon, Booking, eBay, and Aliexpress, …
• Retention base: The business earns money by user retention on the service or product. usually earn money from advertising for example Spotify, Youtube, Instagram,…

Transaction Base model

In the transaction base business usually UX much more important than UI, in this business, we need to optimize the funnel, and user flow, and focus on product usability as much as we can. The most important thing in this type of business is the turning user into a customer as soon as we can And optimizing shopping time.

This type of business’s visual design adds to the attractiveness of the service but does not necessarily lead to more sales, because users don’t want to stay for a long time on the service. they usually buy & go!

for example, based on the data from alexa.com the average user’s time-on-site on amazon.com is less than 10 minutes.

Retention base Model

In the retention base model, businesses earn money from user retention (usually from advertising). in such products the Visual design and UI design are so important because the user wants to stay and use the service for a long time we need eye-catching design and Attractive UI.

Because we want the user to be persistent, we should use visual attractiveness as much as possible.

The product we intend to sell

There is also a type 3 of the business model that the UI is so important.

And That’s When we have a B2B Product and we want to sell service or software to customers. for example, to sell our payroll software to another company it is so important to use a great visual design to motivate the customer to buy the product/software.

conclusion

What has been said is a general theory of the relationship between visual design and the business model, and it cannot always be said to be a true statement. There are many examples that contradict this theory.