I’m a little disappointed to discover so much business crossover in the UX world. I understand that business needs drive the designers to get a better edge, but I’d rather steer clear of the middle management and bottom lines while trying to discover the most intuitive things for people to do with machines. Kind of selfish, perhaps, but I’m more MS Publisher than MS Excel. (pardon the clunky analogy)
My concern about the influence of business on design is that the wrong elements might be taken into account when thinking about how people interact with things. Meaning that someone who is interested in producing something as cheaply as possible in order to grab a portion of a market share isn’t likely to take a step back to look at the individual human using the product, but rather watch the larger trends of people’s mass behavior.
However, if the design is brought into the business realm first, it can drive a business model that could be very productive for the designer, business, and user alike. I suppose it’s just the “human centered” portion of “human-centered design”.
TL;DR: Keep people first, and the money will follow
Al's experience 