53: The Design Renaissance: Why Leading Companies Are Betting on UX

Why Smart Companies Are Doubling Down on Design as Others Pull Back

AI-generated futuristic reinterpretation of the Vitruvian Man, featuring a glowing human figure in yellow with sci-fi interface elements. Generated using OpenAI’s DALL·E.

In 2022, Meta handed pink slips to 1 in 8 employees, including designers who built the interfaces billions use daily. Twitter’s design team was decimated overnight. Even Figma, the tool designers rely on, trimmed its design staff. The message seemed clear: design had become expendable. But eighteen months later, the pendulum is swinging back—hard.

Companies that scaled back on design are now quietly, sometimes urgently, rebuilding. Why? Because the downstream effects are no longer deniable. Support tickets have surged—according to Zendesk, the average ticket costs $15.56 to resolve, but complex UX-driven issues (like onboarding failures or broken workflows) balloon to $46.69 each.

For a mid-sized SaaS company processing 50,000 tickets annually, that’s $2.3M in avoidable expenses—enough to fund a 10-person design team twice over. Worse, these costs compound: a confusing interface can generate thousands of repeat tickets, tying up support agents for months.

User satisfaction scores are dropping as friction creeps into everyday interactions. Interfaces that once felt seamless now feel sterile. Systems that once empowered users now leave them guessing. The shift is subtle, but the impact is not. And while some teams scramble to rehire, the companies that never abandoned design are pulling ahead, with better retention, more substantial brand equity, and more resilient product ecosystems.

The Contraction: Why Design Was Cut

This wasn’t a random retrenchment. Three forces converged to make design appear dispensable:

• The Illusion of ‘Solved’ Design
  Mature design systems made leaders think the work was done. But as many discovered, systems don’t evolve on their own. Without stewardship, consistency unravels and coherence erodes.

• Growth-at-all-costs pushed design out of the spotlight.
  Design’s long-term contributions—like trust, loyalty, and clarity—didn’t appear in weekly dashboards in the race to optimize acquisition and engagement. The result: strategic design looked like overhead.

• Economic pressure rewarded short-term thinking.
  When budgets tightened, design was framed as a cost center rather than a value multiplier. While cutting design may have appeased CFOs, it quietly undermined product quality, team efficiency, and customer experience.

The results were predictable.
Organizations that reduced their investment in design soon faced hidden costs. Support volumes rose as users struggled with interfaces once known for clarity. Inconsistencies began surfacing in previously polished experiences, eroding trust and increasing friction. Operational debt accrues interest.

A fintech startup ignored its design debt for 18 months, letting inconsistencies pile up across 12 product teams. By the time leadership acted, resolving the mess required a 6-month ‘design bankruptcy’ project: freezing feature development, auditing 500+ screens, and retraining engineers on the rebuilt system. The cost? $4M in delayed roadmap initiatives and a 9% dip in customer satisfaction. As one CTO admitted, ‘We thought we were saving money. Instead, we paid a tax we didn’t know existed.

The Recognition: Design’s Value Becomes Visible

When design disappears, users notice. They may not say, “The information hierarchy is broken,” but they feel it: “This app’s harder to use.” They won’t name interaction inconsistencies, but they’ll abandon onboarding flows. This visibility is sparking a reckoning:

• Customer signals are becoming unignorable.
  Organizations tracking metrics like Net Promoter Score, support ticket volume, and drop-off rates are seeing a clear pattern: substantial design investment correlates with better business outcomes. Teams that sustained or grew their design capacity during lean periods are now seeing measurable gains in customer satisfaction, while those that pulled back are struggling to keep pace.

• Differentiation is returning to design.
  In categories where feature sets are nearly identical, experience becomes the battleground. Linear’s growth owes much to design excellence in a sea of utilitarian project management tools. Their advantage isn’t cosmetic—it’s systemic. Design shapes the product's appearance and how it works, feels, and earns trust, creating competitive distance through coherence and clarity.

• Operational costs are rising without design.
  Without designers, engineers become makeshift UX fixers—a $150/hour solution for a $50/hour problem. At a tech unicorn that cut its design staff, developers spent 30% of their time tweaking button placements and error messages instead of shipping core features. Support teams, meanwhile, drafted 40-page FAQs to explain workflows that a well-designed interface could clarify at a glance. These aren’t efficiencies; they’re organizational false economies.

The Renaissance: Where Design Is Headed

The companies thriving today didn’t just survive the design contraction—they invested through it. And now they’re emerging stronger:

• Design as strategic intelligence.
  At Notion, design research informs product strategy, not just visual direction. Rather than reacting to feature requests, the team proactively identifies unmet needs and whitespace opportunities, surfacing patterns that engineering- or sales-led roadmaps might overlook. Design is becoming a core input into what products should exist and why.

• Design as ethical infrastructure.
  The absence of design has enabled dark patterns and exploitative UX to proliferate. Leading companies are reinstating design not just as a creative function, but as an ethical compass—embedding checks against manipulative flows and ensuring user trust isn’t sacrificed for growth. Good design doesn’t just convert—it protects.

• Design in the age of AI.
  As automation absorbs repetitive work, the human aspects of design—judgment, storytelling, emotional nuance—grow in value. At Figma, AI handles tedious tasks like layout alignment or copy suggestions, freeing designers to focus on higher-order challenges: experience architecture, product vision, and building for long-term relevance. In an AI future, design becomes the differentiator.

The Imperative for Leaders

The window for strategic design investment is wide open. Here’s how to step through it:

1. Measurement & Impact: Treat design as a growth engine, not a garnish.
   Measure design’s contribution to core business outcomes—customer lifetime value, support ticket volume, user activation, and time-to-value. These metrics reveal how design accelerates growth and reduces friction, making investment decisions easier to justify and optimize.

2. Talent Acquisition: Hire while exceptional talent is available.
   The design talent pool is stronger—and more accessible—than in years. Prioritize hiring systems thinkers who lead cross-functionally, connect user needs to business strategy, and elevate product direction beyond surface-level execution.

3. Strategic Integration: Embed design in the core of decision-making.
   Involve design leaders in roadmap planning, market sizing, and competitive analysis. Their research often uncovers unmet needs and whitespace opportunities. At Figma, this led to FigJam—a strategic extension into team collaboration that strengthened their platform and market share.

4. Organizational Maturity: Build compounding design capability.
   Don’t just hire for output—hire for organizational uplift. Design teams that coach peers, improve decision quality, and scale design literacy create durable advantages. Their impact outlasts projects and strengthens the entire product development culture.

5. Operational Infrastructure: Invest in the systems that let design scale.
   As design’s role expands, so must the infrastructure that supports it. Build clear decision frameworks, shared design principles, reusable components, and research repositories. These systems reduce duplication, speed up execution, and allow teams to focus on solving real problems, not reinventing the wheel.

The Competitive Reality

McKinsey’s landmark research on The Business Value of Design revealed that companies in the top quartile for design performance outperformed industry revenue benchmarks by up to two times over five years. These companies didn’t treat design as a one-time initiative or aesthetic layer—they embedded it deeply across product, service, and strategy.

What differentiated them was their consistent, long-term commitment to design as a system, not just a department. This investment paid off through stronger customer loyalty, faster product adoption, and measurable top-line growth.

Meanwhile, sideline design companies face a quieter, compounding cost: design debt. Inconsistent interfaces, fragmented experiences, and lost moments of differentiation accumulate over time. Like technical debt, this erosion is expensive to fix and harder to recover from.

The Future Is Being Designed Now

This renaissance isn’t nostalgic. It’s evolutionary.

Climate tech, spatial computing, and AI will not reach their potential without design leadership, not because of how they look but because of how people will live with them.

The math is stark: Design isn’t the place to cut when every dollar counts—it’s the multiplier hiding in plain sight.

Design isn’t coming back—it’s already here. The only question is whether your company will lead the wave or scramble to catch up.