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Championing the value of UX means communicating the business impact of design in language that resonates with the people who make decisions. It is not enough to do great work and hope stakeholders notice. Skilled UX designers, product managers, and future leaders know how to connect design decisions to business outcomes and make that case clearly and convincingly.
What Is "Championing the Value of UX"?
Championing the value of UX is the 10th competency of UX design. It is the ability to weave business knowledge with communication skills so that design's contribution to the organization is understood, valued, and funded.
Some less experienced designers believe their job begins and ends with making digital experiences look and feel great. In their view, the work should speak for itself. But the value design brings to a business is not always obvious. That is where this competency comes in.
Why Does Communicating UX Value Matter?
Consider what happened during the first televised presidential debate between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon in 1960.
Radio listeners named Nixon the winner. Television viewers preferred the calm, collected Kennedy over a visibly uncomfortable Nixon dabbing sweat from his forehead between remarks. Nixon's campaign scrambled to improve his image in subsequent debates, but the damage was done. JFK went on to become President of the United States, in large part because of the power of the televised broadcast.
Kennedy had written about this as far back as 1959, in a TV Guide essay titled "A Force That Changed the Political Scene," where he argued that television would fundamentally change the way political candidates connect with voters. Not just what they say, but how they say it.
That distinction is everything. Skilled UX designers understand the same principle: it is not just about what you say, it is about how you say it.
How Do UX Professionals Speak the Language of Digital Business?
By adapting their message to their audience.
Few people speak the same way at work as they do at home. Acronyms like ROI and CTA mean nothing at the dinner table, but they are central to how business gets discussed. The same gap exists within a business. Designers use an entirely different vocabulary than someone working in accounting or legal.
Yet UX influences every part of a business, from finance to customer service to business development. That is why UX strategists who can adapt their storytelling style are better positioned to operate right where they need to be: at the center of user needs, business goals, and technical constraints.
Instead of saying "adding affordance" when talking about interaction design to customer service reps, a skilled UX designer might say "making the button appear pushable." The message stays the same. The audience's ability to understand and connect with it improves.
UX designers do this every day with great UX writing, and that same skill shapes how they talk to colleagues. Connecting design decisions to metrics is critical, and language plays a central role in doing so.
What Metrics Help UX Designers Make the Business Case?
Active Users and Customer Retention
Attracting new users to an experience is one thing. Keeping them there is another. Users are more likely to return to experiences that make it easy to complete a task. Rates of active and returning users are a practical lever for making the case for design changes.
Instead of this: "If an interaction or workflow feels seamless and frictionless, they are more likely to continue interacting with it in the future."
Say this: "Forrester data indicates that experiences crafted by UX designers have higher rates of customer retention."
Net Promoter Score (NPS)
Net Promoter Score, or NPS, helps business leaders understand how loyal their customers are to their brand or products. It is calculated based on responses to a single question: "How likely is it that you would recommend our company, product or service to a friend or colleague?" Higher NPS scores usually correlate strongly with financial growth.
UX designers know that customers are far more likely to remain loyal to a product or service that feels meaningful and intuitive. But those words are unlikely to persuade business leaders focused on the bottom line. NPS gives designers a way to express qualitative design value in quantitative terms.
Instead of this: "People are more likely to remain loyal to experiences that feel meaningful to them."
Say this: "Experiences designed by our UX designers showed a bump of +5 NPS in A/B testing."
Standard Usability Scale (SUS)
The Standard Usability Scale, or SUS, is an industry-standard tool that provides a quick read on the overall usability of a digital experience. It consists of a 10-item questionnaire with five response options, ranging from Strongly agree to Strongly disagree.
For designers, it is a fast, credible way to explain whether an experience is succeeding.
Instead of this: "UX designers can make digital experiences more coherent, consistent and easy to use."
Say this: "Adding UX designers has been shown to push our apps from Unacceptable to Excellent on the System Usability Scale."
How Does Drawbackwards Measure UX Performance?
At Drawbackwards, we use a tool called UX Rings that takes SUS and NPS one step further by providing a more comprehensive look at performance across five key areas.
Each rating correlates to a rung on the user experience success ladder, which makes it a practical tool when discussing UX with other business stakeholders. Unlike more simplified ratings, UX Rings immediately highlights the specific areas that need attention. It helps designers and strategists quantify their design decisions in a way that is both comprehensive and easy to communicate.
Why Is Storytelling a Core UX Skill?
Because aligning business goals with user needs is not easy, and data alone does not close the gap.
Unless designers can connect the dots between the business and its customers' needs, they will not succeed in turning business initiatives into customer-centric experiences. Using language that makes sense to internal stakeholders helps UX professionals answer the questions that actually drive investment decisions:
- Why should we invest in this?
- How will this support our business goals?
- How will this improve the user experience?
- What is the ROI?
- What is the risk if we do not invest in this?
When done right, UX can fundamentally change the way a business positions itself in the marketplace. With so many businesses competing for the attention of increasingly sophisticated digital customers, the role of UX is crucial. And so is the ability to tell its story, inside and outside the organization.
FAQ
What does it mean to champion the value of UX? It means communicating design's business impact in language that resonates with stakeholders, connecting design decisions to metrics like retention, NPS, and usability scores rather than relying on design language alone.
What metrics can UX designers use to justify design investments? The most commonly used metrics include rates of active and returning users, Net Promoter Score (NPS), the Standard Usability Scale (SUS), and composite tools like UX Rings, which measure performance across multiple dimensions at once.
Why do UX designers need to adapt how they communicate? Different teams within a business use different vocabulary. A designer who can translate concepts like "affordance" into plain language, or swap subjective descriptions for measurable outcomes, is far more effective at getting buy-in from stakeholders outside the design team.
What is the Standard Usability Scale? The SUS is an industry-standard 10-item questionnaire used to quickly assess the overall usability of a digital experience. Scores map to categories ranging from Unacceptable to Excellent, giving designers a fast, credible benchmark to share with business leaders.
What is UX Rings? UX Rings is a performance measurement tool used at Drawbackwards. It builds on NPS and SUS by evaluating user experience across five key areas, giving designers and strategists a more complete picture of where an experience succeeds and where it needs work.
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