https://medium.com/design-leadership-notebook/why-ux-design-is-a-strategic-business-tool-9184c0feb6c6

User Experience (UX) is the battlefield on which businesses wage and win the battle for the user. Everyone might have an opinion, but the user is the final judge of the quality of your UX. And the quality of your UX is one of the decisive factors for a user to choose between you and your competitor. But that is just one side of the story. Your UX also impacts your organization. The level of ambition, the internal processes, mindset and toolset that is required to deliver the right experience shape your organization. Your User Experience is a tool to achieve your strategic goals both externally and internally. You create a tool and the tool shapes you.

“UX Design is a double edged sword: you create a tool and the tool creates you.”

What most people see of UX Design

On the surface UX designers shape the interface, the interactions a user has with your service. That is why many people confuse UX Design with User Interface (UI) Design or even Graphical Design or Styling. But a UX Designer’s job is much broader that the visual appearance of the interface.

The user experience is determined by a lot of factors:

• Technical: How can I access the service? How does the service perform?
• Logical: Can I do the tasks I need to do? Do I understand the interface?
• Emotional: Do I enjoy the use of the service?
• Transformational: Does the service make my life better?

But there is also the business experience:

• Technical: Can we build and maintain this service? Can we deliver what the user expects?
• Logical: What type of service do we want to provide? What are our strategic goals?
• Financial: What is the Return On Investment (ROI)? What is the business case?
• Emotional: Do employees get exited to work on this service? Does the service inspire future improvements?

All these factors have to be taken into account when designing the user experience of a service. If UX Design is done right, it is the catalyst to bring the user, the technology and the business together in away that creates synergy. The UX Designer does this by creating interfaces. But there are a lot of things that go into the interface, what you see is the accumulation of styling, theming, UI Design, Usability, Interaction Design and UX Design. These things are not all practiced in such a separated manner, but it’s good to differentiate in order not to confuse UX Design with styling or theming. They all contribute, but all ask different questions: