Reconsidering UX ROI: Reversing the Commoditization of UX Practice

Dr. Gabriel Golcher, DBA

Online DBA at Business Science Institute, Cohort 4

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Introduction

User Experience (UX) plays a critical role in the competitiveness and profitability of modern businesses, especially in the software industry. Yet despite its proven strategic value, UX remains widely perceived as a tactical function, and in a 2019 industry survey, UX executives were present in only about 7% of companies.

One reason for this is that UX practitioners often lack the business acumen and tools to demonstrate the return on investment (ROI) of their work. Meanwhile, academic research on UX ROI has stagnated over nearly two decades. My DBA research, grounded in over 18 years of UX practice, set out to bridge this gap between UX’s actual business impact and its organizational recognition.

Research impact(s): key results

The Model of UX ROI, developed from the practitioner interviews, is the central contribution of my research. It is a practical framework that reconceptualizes UX ROI. Contrary to the prevailing view that UX ROI is primarily about measurement, the model shows that generating business impact and conveying that impact to stakeholders through evangelization are equally important. The model identifies six interrelated concepts:

• Expectations of UX ROI: The beliefs business leaders hold about UX’s business impact.

• Potential UX ROI: The opportunities afforded to the UX function to generate business impact; in other words, the UX function’s power and influence.

• Generating UX ROI: The ability of UX to execute work that maximizes business impact.

• Measuring UX ROI: The quantification of that impact through the right metrics.

• Conveying UX ROI: The evangelization of results to stakeholders.

• External factors that affect UX ROI: The cultural, environmental, and industry conditions that shape the above, resulting in unique experiences for UX functions across companies.

The diagram below illustrates the relationships among its six concepts. The first five form a cycle: expectations shape potential, potential enables generation, generation produces results to be measured, measurement substantiates conveying, and conveying reshapes expectations. External Factors sit at the center because they influence every other concept. UX leaders can use the model to diagnose what may be reducing the business impact of their team.

Model of UX ROI (Source: Author)

Another key finding from the practitioner interviews concerns the power and influence of UX functions, which generate substantial business impact yet struggle to translate it into organizational influence. Many practitioners outright reject power even as they seek its benefits: leadership positions, access to resources, strategic influence, and job stability. This tension directly undermines UX’s ability to demonstrate and advocate for its value.

The systematic literature review of 147 academic and industry publications shows that while the volume of UX ROI research is increasing, its composition is shifting from higher-rigor academic and industry sources to lower-rigor ones. For instance, the number of UX practitioners per UX ROI publication has grown from approximately 1,000 in the late 1980s to roughly 1,000,000 by 2023. Similarly, the number of UX academic research publications per UX ROI publication has grown from 5 in 1985 to 1,444 in 2022. UX practice is being served by proportionally less research, and the research that does exist is declining in rigor.

The combined analysis of both studies revealed a significant disconnect between UX ROI research and the lived experiences of UX practitioners. While 78.6% of recent UX ROI publications focus on measurement, only 11.9% address generating UX ROI, and 19.1% address conveying it. This imbalance reflects what I call a mechanics worldview, in which UX ROI challenges are treated as discrete problems solvable through better measurement. My research proposes a shift to a dynamics worldview: UX ROI as an interplay of social forces moderated by the psychological and technical capabilities of its actors. Improved measurement alone cannot resolve UX ROI challenges if expectations, power dynamics, and evangelization are left unaddressed.

A further finding from the combined analysis is the Fundamental Contradiction of UX ROI: while UX has become more valuable and fundamental to businesses than ever, UX practitioners and academics are increasingly disempowered and commoditized. Practitioners lack both the tools and the willingness to advocate for their own impact, while the academic community is least engaged in researching UX ROI precisely when the field needs it most. Addressing this contradiction is essential to reversing the commoditization of UX practice.

Research foundations

My research draws on the theoretical framework of power and influence in organizations, specifically French and Raven’s (1959) bases of power and Kipnis, Schmidt, and Wilkinson’s (1980) influence tactics. The former identifies six bases of power — reward, coercive, legitimate, referent, expert, and informational — while the latter maps eleven influence tactics for exercising that power. These concepts proved essential for understanding why UX practitioners, despite possessing expert and informational power, struggle to translate it into organizational influence.

The study is grounded in pragmatism as a research paradigm, which prioritizes producing practical solutions for real-world problems over strict adherence to a single ontological or epistemological position. This paradigm served as the foundation for the abductive research process I employed throughout the study, enabling me to iteratively refine my understanding of the problem and produce actionable recommendations.

Research methodology

The study was structured in two parts. First, I conducted 23 semi-structured interviews with experienced UX practitioners to understand how they generate, measure, and convey UX ROI, and how power and influence shape their experience. Interview data was analyzed using thematic coding, producing six interrelated concepts and their associated key themes, which together formed the Model of UX ROI.

Second, I conducted a systematic literature review evaluating 147 academic and industry publications on UX ROI, performing both a characteristics analysis and a contents analysis. This enabled me to identify five eras of research and several cross-cutting trends, including the shift in research composition and the field’s overwhelming focus on measurement.

Finally, I combined the findings from both the practitioner interviews and the systematic literature review to identify patterns that neither study could reveal on its own. Through this combined lens, the worldview shift from mechanics to dynamics, and the Fundamental Contradiction of UX ROI, became apparent.

Bibliography

• Bias, R. G., & Mayhew, D. J. (Eds.) (2005). Cost-Justifying Usability: An Update for the Internet Age (2nd ed.). Morgan Kaufmann.

• Moran, K., & Liu, F. (2020). UX Metrics and ROI (5th ed.). Nielsen Norman Group.

• French, J., & Raven, B. (1959). The bases of social power. In D. Cartwright (Ed.), Studies in Social Power (pp. 150–168). University of Michigan.

• Raven, B. H. (1965). Social Influence and Power. In I. D. Steiner & M. Fishbein (Eds.), Current Studies in Social Psychology (pp. 371–382). Holt, Rinehart and Winston.

• Kipnis, D., Schmidt, S. M., & Wilkinson, I. (1980). Intraorganizational influence tactics: Explorations in getting one’s way. Journal of Applied Psychology, 65(4), 440–452.

• Yukl, G., & Tracey, J. B. (1992). Consequences of influence tactics used with subordinates, peers, and the boss. Journal of Applied Psychology, 77(4), 525–535.

• Rosenberg, D. (2004). The myths of usability ROI. Interactions, 11(5), 22–29.

• Churchill, E. F. (2017). The ROI of HCI. Interactions, 24(3), 22–23.

• Sheppard, B., Kouyoumjian, G., Sarrazin, H., & Dore, F. (2018). The Business Value of Design. McKinsey & Company.

• Wong, R. Y. (2021). Tactics of Soft Resistance in User Experience Professionals’ Values Work. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 5(CSCW2).

Keywords

User Experience (UX), Return on Investment (ROI), Power and Influence, Evangelization, Practitioner Interviews, Systematic Literature Review (SLR), UX Leadership, Financial Metrics, Executive Representation