Picture the budget meeting. A UX lead stands up and reports a quarter of work: 24 user interviews, 3 usability studies. The room nods. Nobody asks a question, and the money goes elsewhere.
Nielsen Norman Group says this scene plays out constantly, and that the work is rarely the problem. “UX teams rarely lose budget conversations because their work isn’t valuable. They lose them because of how the work gets reported.” In an article published July 3, the firm argues that usability data and user quotes, though valid, do not show executives how research touches the bottom line.
The stakes are bigger than one meeting. As organizations build measurement cultures around their investments, the article warns, teams that cannot link their output to business results get categorized as cost centers and cut accordingly.
Effort is not impact
The article names two reporting habits that make UX look like a cost center. One is describing effort. Leaders hear what was done, see resources spent, and find nothing to show for it. The other is reporting in metrics nobody upstairs follows. The firm gives the example of a System Usability Scale score. A CFO does not know what it means or whether a 74 is good, and a VP of operations cannot connect a task-completion rate to the quarterly targets they answer for.
McKinsey research found that more than half of companies had no objective way to assess what their design teams produce. When UX cannot speak the language of business, leaders fall back on gut feel, or on whichever team can.
The five questions
The article ties UX work to the questions leaders ask about any investment. A few of them:
Does it protect revenue? Friction in checkout flows, signup funnels and feature usage causes drop-off that traces to design decisions.
Does it cut support costs? Unclear interfaces and broken onboarding send users to phone and email. Redesign a flow, count contacts before and after, and the article says you have some of the most persuasive data available.
Does it reduce rework and risk? A problem caught in Figma is a quick fix. One caught after development can need engineering time, QA cycles and a full redesign, which pushes release dates. Research that surfaces failure modes before launch, the article says, is risk mitigation, and a usability study costs little next to a compliance violation or a product recall.
Does it improve retention? Users leave when features that would help them are hard to find. Teams can compare weekly cohorts still active after 7 or 30 days, before and after an onboarding change, and watch CSAT and NPS for satisfaction.
Building the bridge
Upstream metrics, the article explains, show how the design performed: task success, error rates, SUS scores. Downstream metrics show what changed for the business: support volume, conversion, churn. Teams should keep both and connect them. Finance, product analytics, customer support and marketing already hold the numbers, it notes, and if a UX team has no access to them, that is the first conversation to have.
The firm is careful about the limits. “The goal isn’t to overstate what UX delivers,” it says. The aim is to show a connection that already exists.
