“We conducted 24 user interviews and ran 3 usability studies this quarter.” It sounds like a solid quarter. To a budget committee, it sounds like a bill.
That is the argument in a Nielsen Norman Group article by Lola Famulegun on how UX teams report their work. Budget fights, she says, are seldom lost on the merit of the research. They are lost on how it gets described. Usability data and user quotes are valid, but they do not tell senior executives what the research did for the bottom line. Think of two languages spoken in one company. UX has to make sure it speaks the one the executives use.
The stakes have grown as companies build measurement habits around every investment. A UX team that cannot tie its work to business results risks more than one lost meeting. It gets filed as a cost center, which the article defines as a function that spends money with no visible return, and cost centers get trimmed.
Two reporting habits that hurt
The first is reporting effort instead of impact. The sentence about 24 interviews tells leadership what the team did and nothing about what changed. Executives see resources spent and nothing to show for them.
The second is reporting UX metrics that leadership never asked for. A CFO has no yardstick for a System Usability Scale score and no way to know whether 74 is good. A VP of operations cannot link a task-completion rate to the quarterly targets they answer for. Those figures belong in the research report, the article says, not in a budget conversation.
It cites McKinsey research finding that more than half of companies had no objective way to judge what their design teams produce. Without a business-language report, leaders fall back on gut feel, or on whichever teams do report that way.
What leaders look for
Famulegun walks through five questions executives use to size up any investment. Poor UX can suppress revenue, because friction in checkout, signup and feature use causes drop-off. Every support contact has a price, and unclear interfaces generate what operations teams call “failure demand,” contacts that exist only because the product failed the user. Contact volume before and after a redesign of one flow is, in her words, some of the most persuasive data a UX team can bring.
Rework is another cost. A problem caught in Figma is cheap to fix, and it gets more expensive the further it travels through the build. Errors caused by design, such as missed transactions or wrongly submitted forms, can create legal, compliance and financial exposure. A usability study costs little next to a compliance violation or a product recall. The fifth question is whether users stay, which teams can measure by tracking how many users from a given week are still active 7 or 30 days later, or with CSAT and NPS scores.
Upstream and downstream
The article splits metrics in two. Upstream numbers, such as task success rates, error rates and SUS scores, show how the design performed. Downstream numbers, such as support contact volume, conversion rates and churn, show what changed for the business. Teams do not have to drop what they already collect, but they need a bridge to what leadership tracks.
The data usually exists already. The advice is to work with finance, product analytics, customer support or marketing to get before-and-after figures for redesigned flows. Even rough data persuades if it is honest, and the article offers a model line: “Contacts about [feature] dropped 30% in the quarter following the navigation change.” It adds that none of this works without access to downstream data, so a team cut off from analytics, support or finance reporting should start there.
Designer Roger Wong, commenting on the piece, recalled that his own team had to fight his company’s revenue operations group for Salesforce data, so they could use annual recurring revenue when deciding priorities.
Sources
- Stop Reporting UX Activity and Report Business Outcomes
- Stop Reporting UX Activity and Report Business Outcomes – Roger Wong
