When "Lipstick on a Pig" Is Actually True
One of the most dismissive remarks I've heard about UX is that it's simply "putting lipstick on a pig." While the phrase is intended to undermine the value of design, there are situations where it accurately describes the role organizations ask designers to play. The product has already been conceived. Features have already been prioritized. Engineering has already invested months building it. Somewhere towards the end of the journey, a designer is invited in with a simple request: make it look better.
Ask for decoration. Get decoration. Incremental improvements through typography, layout, and visual polish. While worthwhile, they represent a tiny fraction of what design can contribute.
Design adds value, that is not the question. The question is what kind of value an organization allows it to create.
The Value You Get Depends on the Value You Expect
Organizations receive the value they ask design to create. If they ask for prettier screens, they'll get prettier screens. If they ask for shared understanding, better decisions, and clearer product thinking, that's what design can help create.
An organization uses design according to its understanding of what design is capable of contributing. Leaders who see design as visual refinement, invite designers towards the end of the process, when it is already too late. It only creates marginal improvementgs. Leaders who understand design as a way of exploring ideas, reducing uncertainty, aligning stakeholders, and improving product thinking invite design into the conversation much earlier. That is when it can enable a giant leap.
Underutilisation of design in not out of malice, it is driven by expectations. Those expectations define the role design is allowed to play, and that role ultimately determines the value the organization receives.
Design Can Improve Outputs. Or It Can Improve Thinking.
Think of design as operating across a broad spectrum. At one end, design improves outputs. It refines interfaces, enhances usability, strengthens branding, and creates more polished experiences. These are valuable contributions, and every successful product needs them.
At the other end of the spectrum, design improves thinking. It helps teams understand customers more deeply. It uncovers hidden assumptions. It facilitates conversations that might otherwise never happen. It aligns stakeholders who come from different disciplines and different perspectives. It helps organizations make better decisions long before anyone begins designing screens.
The further upstream design is invited into the product journey, the greater its opportunity to influence the quality of those decisions.
When a Sketch Changed the Conversation
As part of a senior cross-functional team working on an important client engagement, in a room was filled with experienced professionals from engineering, business, and leadership, we were all looking at the same information, yet everyone seemed to interpret it slightly differently. The challenge wasn't that people lacked information. The challenge was that we lacked a shared understanding.
Around that time, I had become fascinated by sketchnotes and visual thinking. Instead of writing another document, I translated the entire business scenario into a simple visual story and illustrated it as a sequence of events that anyone could follow.
The reaction surprised me. What I created wasn't admired because it was visually attractive. It was valuable because everyone in the room suddenly understood the problem in the same way. Conversations became more focused. Decisions became easier. We had moved from individual interpretations to a common mental model.
The biggest surprise, however, was my own realization. Even after years of working in design leadership, I hadn't fully appreciated the value I had added. I thought I had created a useful sketch. What I had actually created was alignment.
The Most Valuable Design Deliverable Is Often Invisible
One of design's greatest contributions isn't creating artifacts. It's creating shared understanding before the artifacts are created.
That experience fundamentally changed the way I think about design. We often judge design by the artifacts it produces—wireframes, prototypes, interfaces, design systems, and polished user experiences. Those outputs certainly matter, but they are often the visible consequence of something much more valuable that happened much earlier.
Before a product roadmap is finalized, teams need alignment. Before engineering begins implementation, assumptions need to be challenged. Before features are prioritized, customer problems need to be understood. Design has the ability to contribute meaningfully at every one of those stages, not because designers have all the answers, but because they have methods that help teams discover better answers together.
Workshops, journey maps, service blueprints, storyboards, sketches, and collaborative discovery sessions are not valuable because they produce attractive artifacts. They are valuable because they reduce ambiguity, improve communication, and help organizations make better decisions.
Why Some Organizations Only Get Better Screens
The designers themselves haven't changed. Their skills haven't suddenly improved because they joined a different company. What changes is the expectation placed upon them.
If leaders invite design only after every significant decision has already been made, design naturally focuses on improving execution. If leaders involve design while ideas are still evolving, design has the opportunity to improve the thinking behind those ideas. The quality of the outcome is directly influenced by the point at which design enters the conversation.
This is why I believe discussions about when to hire designers often miss the point. Before deciding when design should be involved, organizations should first decide what they want design to contribute.
From Lipstick to Unicorns
The title of this article is deliberately provocative, but it isn't meant to suggest that design alone creates unicorns. No single discipline builds extraordinary companies. Successful products emerge from great leadership, strong engineering, sound business strategy, market timing, execution, and many other factors working together.
Design is one of those factors. If its role is limited to polishing interfaces, then polishing interfaces is all it can contribute. But if organizations invite design to participate in understanding customers, framing problems, aligning stakeholders, and improving decisions, then design has the opportunity to influence something much larger than the interface itself.
The difference between putting lipstick on pigs and helping build unicorns isn't the talent of the designers. It isn't the size of the budget. It isn't even the maturity of the organization.
The difference is the role leaders invite design to play.
A Question Worth Asking
The next time you're deciding when to involve design, don't begin with budgets or headcount. Begin with a simpler question.
What do you believe design is capable of contributing?
Your answer to that question will determine whether design simply improves what has already been decided—or helps shape decisions that create products people truly value.
