Convince management to care about UX

Business Benefits

Improve customer loyalty, decrease bounce rates, and increase conversions and sales.


Identify your management’s reasons for not wanting to invest in UX and their key business and sales concerns that could be addressed by UX.

To define the priorities and concerns of the people you’re trying to convince, refer to quarterly reports, annual reports, 1:1 meetings, and team goals. Common reasons for not wanting to invest in UX include:

  • The cost.
  • Not accurately understanding what UX is.
  • Not wanting to invest resources in research and development.
  • Not understanding how good UX creates a happy and loyal customer.
  • Not knowing your site’s UX is an issue.

Gather statistics about UX, quotes from customers and industry leaders, user testing data, and examples of both good and bad UX.

Use your stakeholder’s reasons and concerns as a starting place in finding the right evidence. For example, you may find that management is most concerned about the cost of improving UX, so your argument should first prove that good UX is actually cost-effective. Find multiple types of evidence, like:

  • User testing from your website to show specifically what is wrong with your site. Use a heat map tool like Crazy Egg or Hotjar to show missed conversion opportunities and what information and design elements on your site are important to customers.
  • Website analytics, like bounce rate, click-throughs, and page views.
  • UX and website statistics, like how mobile users are 5 times more likely to abandon a task if the mobile design is not optimized.
  • Complaints about your site’s UX from customer interviews, chatbot logs, customer support logs, reviews, or surveys.
  • Social proof from respected industry leaders, like their engagement metrics, a quote from an industry leader about UX, or their good UX examples.
  • Data about cost-inefficiencies from bad UX, like the cost of a support call for website help, and data about good UX’s cost-effectiveness, like projections for revenue increases if you improve conversions by X amount.
  • Your competitor’s website as an example of good UX.

Show the impact of bad UX on your current website, including missed conversion opportunities and high bounce rates, using Google Analytics or a heat map tool like Hotjar.

Use pageview, bounce rate, and time on-page metrics on Google Analytics to show that users are getting stuck, not finding certain pages, and leaving your site. Use a heatmap tool like Hotjar to show where users are getting stuck and all the conversion opportunities that they miss or avoid. Consider also explaining how good UX leads to higher conversion rates and sales by sharing public case studies about companies who’ve had success with UX.

Show how good UX is cost-effective by sharing data on the cost of bad UX, and the ROI on good UX.

For example:

  • Calculate the cost of a support call about a confusing site feature.
  • Share a story about a customer having X amount of items in their cart before abandoning it after experiencing site issues.
  • If your site has any good or comparatively better UX examples, compare the conversion rates on that page to your other pages.
  • Estimate how much time can be saved by team members if a certain aspect of UX is improved or automated, so that they can work on other tasks instead.

Explain how good UX strengthens brand identity and can make your brand stand out from competitors by showing examples of good vs bad UX.

Show general good UX examples, especially if stakeholders seem uncertain of what good UX is. Personalize this by finding examples of bad UX on your website from user testing and good UX on a competitor’s website.

Explain how good UX leads to greater customer loyalty and longer website sessions by sharing user data and customer stories.

Show user tests where users abandon your site because they couldn’t find what they are looking for, share customer service complaints about your site’s issues, or share case studies about brands who have used UX to increase the number of repeat customers.

Enhance each argument with customer and industry quotes, specific emotional stories, and general and brand specific statistics.

For example, add emotional impact, authenticity, and storytelling to your evidence by using audio clips, photos, screen grabs, and quotes that humanize data and statistics.

Invite fellow UX supporters at your company to share their first-hand experience about why UX matters.

Look for diverse job roles that all experience bad UX’s pitfalls, like web developers who have to keep fixing the same issues because not enough money was put into research and development, customer service representatives who are consistently coaching users through the same website problems, and frustrated marketers who have unanswered ideas to better optimize the site for your audience. Have a discussion with fellow UX supporters before presenting to make sure you’re on the same page about UX goals.

Show a usability test, user interview, or ask the stakeholder to use a service with bad UX and one with good UX to show the difference.

Use a tool like Maze or User Testing to record a usability test demo. Conduct multiple user interviews about your site’s bad UX if possible to show that it’s a widespread opinion. For a hands-on demonstration, ask the stakeholder to perform a task, like fill out a form on a mobile device. Ask them to do it once on a site with good UX and then on a site with bad UX to compare.

Present a concrete plan to improve your UX that includes benchmarks, goals, and actionable steps.

For improved chances of stakeholder buy-in, consider presenting a gradual pilot plan that involves updating one only page to prove results. Update one page, record what changes were made, collect data, and then present the findings and ROI to show why it’s worth updating your whole site. Include concrete benchmarks and goals, like by making X improvements, we can improve conversion rates by Y at a cost of $N. Increasing conversion rates by B% can increase revenue by $C for an ROI of D.

Last edited by @hesh_fekry 2023-11-14T10:50:42Z