The ROI of UX is so massive that no one will believe you

Welcome back, picnickers!

A small update before we get into this week’s content: if you like my writing but have thought “what if instead of reading text, it could be sounds that I listen to with my ears” then I have a remedy for what ails you. I’ll be closing Button 2025 with a keynote that expands on some of my recent writing. Hope to see you there!

Regular readers will recognize the themes I touch on here. Indeed, it’s hardly the first time that I’ve called out the industry as over-indexing on “deliverables” as the vehicle for our value. Turns out that designers are actually not special. This effect exists across other fields as well: artifacts whose purpose is fulfilled in the act of having produced them, which exist for the sake of taking up oxygen.

Designers (at least, my readers!) already understand that taste is a dead end. But identifying attributable impacts of their work is an eternal challenge. We want to convince hiring managers that we have impacts, and hiring managers want to be convinced.

But there is always lingering doubt: could design actually be so impactful?

In this post, Danny Hearn says what a lot of HMs are thinking: just because a metric moved when you were there doesn’t mean you can take credit for it. And sure, yeah: if someone else already made a decision and your only role was to “validate” it then you didn’t accomplish anything except producing an output. Obsessively attaching a metric to every resume line item regardless of whether or not it makes sense is just an echo of measureship and creates more problems than it solves (although Shannon Mattern’s 10+ year old framing of the same phenomenon as methodolatry is absolutely worth revisiting).

Indeed, the very idea of quantifying our impacts gets a lot of (justifiable) resistance. As with many other aspects of UX, many grifters claim that doing this is easy when it’s anything but.

Every practitioner will have a different answer to this dilemma. Mine is this: if design is the applied science of decision-making, then our impact can be measured by the decisions that we guide. Which means that we need to get out of the delivery dead end into which our practice has been boxed. And we need to change the perception around what design can or cannot do.

For example, the narrative that human-centered design “slows us down” is taken at face value on most teams. But as Kelly Moran points out in her comment on this post: why does business think that it moves fast without us? The reality couldn’t be further from the truth. Teams that refuse to take the time to create clarity sink into a morass of ambiguity. Without user research as a source of truth, priorities will change overnight alongside stakeholder whims.

Meanwhile, one of the actual best ways to accelerate your decision-making is to create enabling constraints via design principles.

So why is it so hard to convince stakeholders (whether your current management, or the hiring manager at your next role) that design really is that valuable?

Because something so insignificant as facts will never change minds. The more unexpected your findings are, the less convincing they will be (which is ironic, because the unexpected findings are the most valuable, and findings that simply confirm what everyone already believed are worthless). Indeed, there are very common worldviews throughout tech that (wrongly) reject the very idea that research can tell them anything.

Rather than spending all of your efforts on producing the most bulletproof evidence, take the Pareto-efficient approach. Ask — like Scott Kubie does here — why the perfectly good evidence you already have isn’t convincing.

Frequently (not always, but more often than you think!) the answer will be that the insight came too abruptly; you did not create fertile soil in which that seed might grow. The way you do that might surprise many designers. It certainly would have surprised me, at the beginning of my career.

Sales! You have to do sales!

When I first started in UX, I thought Sales was fundamentally anti-UX. Oh, you ask customers what they want and then you tell me to design that? That’s bad practice, don’t you know?

Well, it turns out that a lot of Sales people agree! That is bad practice, and what the smartest people in that industry describe as good practice looks a hell of a lot like user research.

We were onto something for a moment when we talked about customer experience (CX) as a superset of UX. But while we rapidly lost the plot, understanding how to fix the conversion funnel is still critical knowledge for any designer — because it is this exact same process that determines whether a user chooses to engage with your feature, or chooses to go outside and touch grass.

Don’t build to learn. Sell to learn. Or if you’re a real pro, learn before you sell and you’ll create pull like no one else in the business.

— Pavel at the Product Picnic