How UX/UI affects ROI in software projects

Reduced Churn: Why bad design generates revenue losses

You can spend months on feature development and marketing campaigns, but if your product feels unintuitive, users won’t stick around. Churn isn’t only about missing functionality - it’s often about friction.

Picture this: a project management tool where creating a new task requires filling four mandatory fields, navigating three dropdowns, and confirming twice. It technically works, but it feels like work. Now compare that to a tool where a single keyboard shortcut gets you started instantly. The second product hasn’t added features; it has reduced friction. That’s UX design directly reducing churn.

Retention doesn’t just improve MRR - it compounds. A 5% increase in customer retention can lead to more than a 25% increase in profits, according to Bain & Company. That’s design ROI, expressed in numbers.

Onboarding: The first 10 minutes decide the next 10 months

For SaaS, onboarding is the do or die stage. It’s not enough for users to sign up - they need to get it. Fast.

Here’s where design plays multiple roles:

• Guidance – Microcopy explaining why a step matters, not just what to do.
• Feedback – Progress bars, confirmations, and “you’re done!” moments that make users feel in control.
• Empathy – Understanding what new users fear (empty states, overwhelming data) and designing against it.

Take an analytics platform: show a blank dashboard, and the message is “good luck.” Show pre-loaded sample data, and suddenly the tool feels usable. That single design decision can be the difference between abandonment and activation.

Conversion Rates: How UI design works like a silent salesperson

Your UI often acts as your first salesperson. Visitors decide in seconds whether to trust your product enough to sign up.

Let’s take SaaS pricing pages - where conversions either happen or die. Poor UI examples include:

• Overloaded tables with 15+ features listed side by side.
• CTA buttons hidden below the fold.
• “Free trial” links styled like footnotes.

Now contrast that with a page where the recommended plan is visually highlighted, the CTA is impossible to miss, and trust signals (like “no credit card required”) are placed right under the button. No new feature was added, but conversion rates climb.

This is why UI design should be treated as part of your growth strategy, not a post-launch cosmetic exercise.

Support costs: The hidden expense of bad UX

Every support ticket is an expense. The irony? Many of them are completely preventable.

Finance apps, for example, often get flooded with repetitive questions: How do I add a new payment method? Where can I download my invoice? These aren’t “complex product” issues - they’re design failures.

Fix the navigation, add clear labels, and include a tiny “?” icon in the right place, and suddenly your support team is free to handle meaningful problems. Lower costs, happier customers.

Development speed: Why designers make developers faster

Here’s a misconception: design slows down shipping. In reality, good design accelerates it.

When teams work without a design system, every new feature sparks endless discussions: “Should the button be blue or green? Rounded or sharp? Do we use icons here?” Multiply that by 20 features, and you have weeks of wasted development time.

A design system flips this around. With predefined patterns, developers can build new features without guessing. Designers don’t have to review every pixel, and QA finds fewer inconsistencies. In practice, this means new functionality can roll out faster, with fewer bugs, and at lower cost.

For startups, where runway is limited, that speed-to-market advantage is a form of ROI often overlooked.

A tale of two startups

• Startup A pours money into development and ads but neglects UX/UI. Users sign up but don’t understand the product, leading to high churn. Support costs rise, and developers drown in inconsistent interfaces.
• Startup B invests early in UX/UI. They streamline onboarding, test conversion flows, and maintain a design system. Users stick around, support is minimal, and developers ship features faster.

Both spent money - but only one saw design translate into measurable ROI.

Design as growth strategy

For SaaS founders and product managers, UX/UI design should never be reduced to “making things pretty.” It’s about shaping measurable business outcomes: better retention, stronger conversions, lower costs, faster delivery. In other words, design is an investment in growth.

At Curiosum, we combine deep technical expertise with a design-first mindset to help SaaS teams build products that don’t just function - they thrive. If you’re curious how design could boost your product’s ROI, we’d love to chat.

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