“UX? Service Design? No, thanks, we’re not focused on innovation or growth right now. Our priority is cutting costs. Anything that isn’t absolutely essential needs to be kept to a minimum.”
This mindset might seem logical, but it’s actually costing companies more than they realize. Many businesses only see experience designers (UX, Service Design, etc.) as critical in times of growth, but what if they were actually your biggest cost-cutting asset?
Yes, experience designers help improve engagement, conversions, and revenue. But they also create operational efficiencies, eliminate waste, and prevent costly mistakes, making businesses run smarter, not harder.
When products and services are easy to use and designed with purpose, customer support demands decrease, employee workloads lighten, and expensive errors are prevented before they happen.
In my 30 years in the industry, I’ve never seen so many highly skilled experience designers available as right now. The current job market presents an incredible opportunity for forward-thinking companies to bring in top talent at a time when efficiency matters most.
Here’s why your next hire should be an experience designer—especially if cutting costs is your top priority.
- Reduce Customer Support Costs. Every confusing step in a process leads to more customer inquiries, refunds, or complaints, and all of these increase costs. Experience designers identify friction points and uncover their root causes before they become costly problems, ensuring users can complete their tasks without needing extra support. The result? Fewer help desk tickets, lower staffing requirements, and a significant reduction in operational expenses.
- Streamline Workflows to Boost Efficiency. A well-designed internal system means employees spend less time on repetitive tasks, fixing errors, or dealing with inefficiencies. Experience designers simplify workflows, optimize interfaces, and remove unnecessary steps, saving valuable time for everyone. When employees can focus on high-impact work instead of fighting against cumbersome processes, productivity (and profitability) naturally increase.
- Prevent Expensive Rework and Failed Initiatives. Even in times of budget cuts, most companies continue launching new features and services. Doing so without truly understanding user needs often leads to costly redesigns or, worse, complete failure. Experience designers validate ideas early, ensuring businesses invest in solutions that actually work—eliminating wasteful spending on misguided projects.
- Increase Retention and Reduce Churn. Acquiring new customers costs far more than keeping existing ones. Experience designers can help you reduce churn by helping you understand WHY customers churn, and by making interactions more intuitive and frustration-free. When customers are satisfied, they buy more and stay longer.
- Lower Training Costs and Onboarding Time. Clunky systems and confusing processes increase the time (and cost) of training new employees. Experience designers improve processes and interfaces so that systems are intuitive from day one, reducing the need for extensive onboarding programs. Employees ramp up faster and make fewer mistakes, which results in lower training expenses and a more efficient workforce.
- Bridge the Gaps Between Teams. Marketing, product, development, and customer support all shape the customer experience. Too often, they operate in silos, which leads to misalignment, inefficiencies, and inconsistent user experiences. Experience designers bridge these gaps by, e.g., creating a shared product vision, aligning teams around customer needs, and fostering cross-functional collaboration. When teams collaborate better, time to delivery is reduced, and customers feel the difference.
Right now, there’s a golden opportunity—many large corporations have made short-term cost-cutting decisions, letting go of highly skilled experience designers. For forward-thinking companies, this means access to an incredible pool of talent who can help drive efficiency and savings.
In the short term, an experience designer can help reduce your costs, and when the timing’s right, they can shift their focus to growth and innovation without skipping a beat.
So… What are you waiting for? If you don’t know where to start, reach out and I’ll help you.
Passionate about people, business and extraordinary experiences
2 天前??
Well-Being Advocate | Champion for Women's Health & Circular Economies | Collaborating for a Sustainable Future
4 天前I must have been an experience designer in my past ?? Just having a process focus and understading of what activities adds value to the customer helps a long way ....many interesting insights surface when an organisation 'see its operations from process flow rather than functional focus'. hmmm, got me reflecting on my own experiences ?? There are many organsiations out there who could improve their balance sheets if they had experience designers and also acted upon outcomes from their work ...actully, I think it could help a lot of 'change programs' to focus on what matter the most to customers ??
Head of Design at Fortnox, author, speaker, founder of Boards on Fire
5 天前One of the most significant cost reductions I see is helping to build the right thing. When research and design are not involved at the start, it's so easy to build stuff that customers don't really want or need. That functionality must still be developed, maintained, and supported. The costs stack up without delivering any real value.
UX designer whose heart beats for accessibility and joyful design.
5 天前Right?! I only graduated from a 2 year UX education in June -24 but THIS is one of the questions that have me so perplexed about the industry right now. To me, the logical step in these times is to hire UX designers. Not just a senior to a strategic role but also at least one junior to infuse that creative, curious, hungry, junior energy into the company. It is NOW that this internal shift will do amazing things for the company and instead of coming out of this "recession" at the bottom of the hill, entering it half way and already running. I don't want to stab my dev friends in the back but perhaps this isn't the time to build things but it is the time to look over buisiness strategy, longterm buisness goals, getting closer to your customers/the end users of your customers. This is the time to reflect and do the strategic design work.
Designer, Strategist, Founder @ In Wise Company. I help businesses learn, transform and execute by fusing two decades of hands-on design expertise with lateral thinking and heart.
5 天前Well put. My personal take is that the injection of non-linear problem solving methods - like the ones that comes from the design toolbox - is generally healthy in many stagnant areas, where it’s necessary to take a leap from a local maxima. Cost cutting can certainly be one target too with this approach The tricky thing in practice, is to attend properly to org maturity, and massage an organisation enough to ensure this type methodology is integrated well throughout the process to avoid the pitfalls of disruption.?Easier said than done.