The Shortcut That Costs More

When budgets are tight or timelines are aggressive, UI/UX design is often the first thing cut. The reasoning feels logical: developers can design as they build, the MVP just needs to work, we can improve the interface later. This logic is understandable. It is also consistently wrong.

Skipping or rushing UX design does not save time and money. It defers costs and amplifies them. Here is what the research and our own project experience consistently shows.

The Cost of Finding Problems Late

There is a well-established principle in software development that the cost of fixing a problem grows dramatically the later it is found. A UX problem identified in a wireframe takes minutes to fix — you move a box on a screen. The same problem identified after the frontend is built requires redesigning components, rewriting logic, and retesting. Identified after launch, it also requires migrating existing users and potentially losing them in the process.

IBM research from the 1990s estimated that fixing a problem in production costs 100 times more than fixing it in design. More recent studies consistently show a 10:1 to 100:1 ratio depending on the type of problem. These numbers are not hypothetical — they reflect real rework costs that projects absorb quietly.

What Poor UX Actually Costs in Practice

Poor user experience does not just create rework costs during development. It creates ongoing business costs after launch:

Support volume. When interfaces are confusing, users ask for help. Every support ticket has a cost — in staff time, in tooling, and in user frustration. Many support requests are really UX failures in disguise.
Abandonment. In consumer-facing applications, poor UX directly drives abandonment. Users who cannot figure out how to complete a task do not ask for help — they leave. Conversion rates, retention metrics, and revenue are all downstream of user experience quality.
Training costs. Enterprise software with poor UX requires extensive training programmes that would be unnecessary if the interface were intuitive. We have seen organisations spend more on training for a poorly designed internal tool than they spent on building it.
Shadow systems. When internal tools are too difficult to use, employees build workarounds — usually spreadsheets. The existence of these shadow systems means your "digital transformation" investment is partially wasted.

What Good UX Design Actually Involves

UI/UX design is often misunderstood as "making things look pretty." It is not. Visual design is one component of a broader process that includes:

User research. Understanding who the actual users are, what they are trying to accomplish, and what mental models they already have. Design that ignores users is guesswork.
Information architecture. Deciding how information is organised and navigated. The structure of your navigation is one of the highest-leverage decisions in any application.
Interaction design. Defining how the system responds to user actions. Feedback, error states, loading states, empty states — every micro-interaction shapes the user's sense of whether the system is working or broken.
Prototype testing. Showing prototypes to real users before building and watching where they get confused. This is the mechanism that catches problems when they are cheapest to fix.
Visual design. Typography, colour, spacing, and visual hierarchy that guide attention and communicate meaning.

How We Integrate Design at Project360

We do not treat design as a phase that happens before development. We treat it as a continuous thread throughout the project. Before any development starts, we build interactive prototypes in Figma and test them with real users. This typically catches 80% of major usability issues before they become code.

During development, our designers and developers work together. Developers flag when a designed interaction is technically expensive to implement; designers flag when implementation shortcuts are creating UX problems. The output is applications that are both well-designed and built to last.

The Business Case for Investing in Design

The Design Management Institute found that design-driven companies outperformed the S&P 500 by 228% over a ten-year period. McKinsey's research shows that companies in the top quartile for design generate 32% more revenue and 56% more total returns to shareholders than their industry counterparts.

These numbers are large enough to sound like marketing. But the mechanism is straightforward: better designed products create better user experiences, which drive higher conversion, lower churn, and lower support costs. The financial impact is real and measurable.

If you are building software — whether for customers or for internal use — investing in proper UX design is not a luxury. It is one of the highest-return investments available in the project budget.