Polina, co-founder of Phenomenon Studio and product strategist. Building and scaling digital products with $500М+ raised collectively.
Companies often focus on developing new channels or features while losing money to a single, invisible barrier in the user flow. If that sounds like an exaggeration, look no further than online travel booking service provider Expedia.
When its team noticed users reaching the payment stage, clicking “Buy Now,” but never completing the purchase, it began analyzing their behavior. The problem turned out to be the “Company” field on the payment form. Some customers were entering their bank’s name there and typing its address instead of their home address, which caused payments to fail. The field was removed, and payments started going through. This added $12 million a year to Expedia’s profits.
This case is over 15 years old, but it’s one of the few public examples of a company revealing how much a single unnecessary interface element cost it. Yet, how many companies still leave profit on the table because they treat design as a production function? In this article, I’ll share my thoughts on how design decisions can help you work toward business results.
Why The Disconnect Between Design And Business Happens
More than half a century ago, Thomas J. Watson Jr., chairman and CEO of IBM, said, “Good design is good business.” That logic holds true for digital products, too. Spurred by the digitalization drive that was accelerated by the pandemic and the economic pressure of recent years, I’ve seen founders increasingly seek approaches in which design decisions don’t just change the user experience, but improve business outcomes overall.
What usually gets in the way isn’t a lack of tools, but rather a design team isolated from your business context. A designer might have quantitative data showing that users are leaving, yet they have no idea why, because the qualitative data, the recordings of sales calls, support tickets and NPS comments, never reaches them.
Another problem comes up when UX metrics are viewed separately from business goals. This can produce paradoxical situations, where usability ratings climb but conversion falls—or satisfaction scores improve but support costs don’t drop. It isn’t a question of team competence, but rather the absence of a shared coordinate system.
Why You Should Connect Design To Business Metrics
A company’s financial report can show how easily a user moves through their journey in the company’s product. By tying the design team’s work to business indicators, you can begin to see a clear correlation between the customer’s steps in the product and the company’s revenue. UX researcher Jared Spool’s famous case of the “$300 Million Button” illustrates this well.
A large e-commerce retailer asked his team to find the reason behind a drop in conversion. The culprit turned out to be a mandatory registration step the user had to complete before paying. To the product team, this looked logical, since an account was meant to simplify future purchases. But people saw the form as an attempt to collect their data for marketing spam, so they simply abandoned their carts. When the “Register” button was replaced with “Continue,” paired with a note that an account wasn’t required, the number of customers completing purchases rose 45%. This brought the company $300 million in additional revenue in the first year after the change.
The same logic works beyond cases where the result is visible at payment. When we redesigned a platform for a medical clinic, we found that a user whose circumstances had changed, and for whom the chosen consultation time no longer worked, had just one option: to cancel the visit. We added a reschedule option, which saved 36% of the visits that would otherwise have been canceled.
How To Build Design Into Your Company’s Business Logic
Connecting design to financial indicators takes more than calculating one redesign’s effect or building a shared product analytics dashboard. You need a system that works at every stage of product development.
Not sure where to start? Begin with a few first steps:
1. Inventory the business metrics you have. Gather numbers for activation rates, conversions, ARPU, retention, churn and CAC paybacks—and give the design team access to them. This gives the team clear reference points.
2. Establish the link between product elements and business metrics. The sign-up flow works toward activation, the pricing page works toward conversion and the support interface works toward CSAT and lower churn. Defining these correlations shows you where UX work will have a business effect. If your quarterly goal is to raise conversion and the biggest drop-off sits in checkout, then that flow should become your priority, not a notional footer redesign.
3. Start with a hypothesis. Every project must begin with clear business logic. For example, you could say, “We believe that changing element X will move metric Y by N% because we have specific data from study Z.” This lets you assess the result objectively, not through a vague sense that things “got better or not,” but by testing a concrete assumption.
4. Focus on a north star metric. The design team should pick one or two key metrics per quarter. This focuses the team and makes their results measurable. In this process, you can use a simple filter, since the metric has to answer one of two questions: how it increases revenue or what losses it helps avoid.
5. Implement a quarterly design impact review. At the end of the quarter, the team should return to the hypotheses it set at the start. Assess what changed, what numbers came in, where things didn’t work and why. You have to show the failures alongside the successes; otherwise, a culture of hypotheses won’t take root, because the team will be afraid to make mistakes in public.
Changing the role of design in a company is a long, hard process. But the result is worth it, because it’s a necessary shift in your development culture. Instead of major, expensive redesigns that your company funds once every few years, your business can grow steadily through precise interface changes that directly affect revenue.
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