The rules of business are fairly simple - provide a product or service such that the market is willing to pay more for it than you spent to provide it. This makes some types of businesses very easy, because a lot of business is just doing things other people either don’t want to do, or can’t do.

Sometimes a market is already filled with these types of businesses. In that case you have to either provide a product or service that’s in some way superior to everyone else’s, or you innovate and create something that nobody else has yet. Either of these can give you the edge you need. In the most difficult cases, you have to do both.

Design in the broadest sense plays a large role in how good a product or service is. This is especially true when trying to stand out as the best choice among many competitors.

Spotify is a good example of this. There’s limited room to technically improve the service of streaming music online. Boost the numbers of available artists and tracks, try to get server reliability as close to 100% as possible, and that’s pretty much it.

Where it excels is user experience, which is boosted by both engineering and visual design. On the engineering end, statistical and machine learning models help users discover new music that they’re likely to enjoy. It’s also very snappy, music plays as soon as you pick

Visually, the app follows all modern design principles. It’s sexy. It feels like a thousand dollars. The personalized reports and playlists give the impression that there’s a team of customer support people on the other end, manually putting it together for you.

Most of the value Spotify comes from its design. This is compared to e.g. Winamp, which provides the service of playing audio files, or Deezer, which provides the service of streaming music online.

There’s not a meaningful way to quantify the effect good design has on products or services. The closest we have to it is some form of A/B testing, from which we can see the results of design changes, though not the effects themselves. Perhaps this is for the best.

The bottom line is that there’s lots of businesses that are just waiting for the proper designer to come and help solve them.