There are a million different cross-disciplinary things that can benefit designers. Maybe they should study whatever they want.

OH FOR FUCKS SAKE.

Yes. Yes. Yes.

This is easily one of the most important topics in Design right now that often is swept under the rug bc designers' eyes tend to glaze over anything remotely related to the word "business."

Understandable, as a lot of us do have backgrounds in fine art, visual design, marketing, etc and sometimes the ENTIRE REASON we got into this game was to simply do stuff we loved and not stuff we don't. We hear we need to code, need to go to more conferences, be more active on social media, need to blog more, more succulent plants on the desk, etc and this EASILY could tire anyone out. I understand completely, trust me. BUT (of course there's a "but") this notion of expanding our perspectives about what design is to include business goals/performance/strategy/etc is a critical one that WILL make you better at your craft in the same way that designing for systems instead of pages made you better at your craft, in the same way of mapping your designs to actual user research made you better at your craft, in the same way that taking the leap from print to digital made you better at your craft and so on and so on.

So do it. Take the dive. And relax, the waters fine. ;)

There's no one unified body of knowledge for designers. Business is a useful field to understand, so is code, so is UX or user testing or business analysis or conversion optimisation or communication theory or finance or ergonomics or accessibility or advertising or any number of related fields. Ultimately you'll have value no matter what you study, but you'll find your career direction will be shaped by what you specialise in. If you like strategy, entrepreneurialism, startups, then by all means study business. If you like working with devs, then study code or business analysis. Consulting, UX/user testing.

Ultimately, if you approach design with a humble attitude and learn from engaging with people, you learn what you need to know.

I love how the guy who wrote this worked at Evernote, a product that has repeatedly gone to shit thanks to terrible design decisions. Huh.

For UX/UI designers is for sure more important to understand the business side of what they're designing than coding, but many design degree programs these days start combining all of those 3. The problem is that for small design companies is better to have someone who can design & code for financial reasons, even if the application of their design won't be of such value for the business.

true.. because designer always have the idea.. and sometimes the idea could be change to something valuable or secret sauce of product.. that's why better learn business rather than code..

This title is pretty misleading. Code literacy and business skills aren't mutually exclusive.

I agree with the overall premise of the article, but it’s written too simplistically to be useful or actionable.

Good designers have always been synthesizers of multiple disciplines and domains to create products that best address the problems and situations at hand. AKA - Design thinking.

With the rise of the “Product Designer” - the need for multi-disciplinary approaches is coming more to the forefront.

It would have been better to focus on the article on more specific aspects of business and help designers understand how those aspects are directly connected to what they're creating.