Calculating the ROI of user research: How to measure and prove impact

Stakeholders aren’t asking whether user research is useful—they’re asking if it’s worth the investment.

This means UX researchers, product managers, and designers need to switch from being technical executors to research advocates. You need to translate user insights into business outcomes—like higher conversion rates, lower churn, faster launches, and increased revenue. In other words, return-on-investment (ROI).

The numbers speaks for themselves—companies that embed user research into business strategy see:

Despite this, teams still struggle to quantify user research ROI in terms that resonate with leadership. To give you a headstart, we’ve put together a foolproof strategy for measuring and communicating the ROI of user research (even to the trickiest of stakeholders).

We spoke with Geoffrey Crofte, Senior UX Lead at Foyer Group, for an honest look at how UX professionals approach proving user research ROI. Here’s his tried-and-tested tips to communicate the value of UX research initiatives, connect research to business value, build stakeholder trust, and secure long-term buy-in.

One of the biggest hurdles to overcome when making a business case for research is connecting your work to business outcomes. When it comes to user research, these journeys are often more…roundabout.

Research doesn’t always produce linear, dollar-in-dollar-out metrics—rather, it reduces risk, prevents costly rework, and enables faster, more confident decision-making.

To demonstrate this Geoffrey suggests thinking about ROI of user research as ROE (return-on-experience), which later turns into ROI:

“ROE measures the value generated by improving users’ experiences. It considers qualitative and quantitative outcomes, like increased user satisfaction, reduced friction, and improved task completion rates.”

The first practical step in calculating ROI is to define what you’re measuring. That starts with selecting user experience KPIs and metrics that reflect key outcomes your research is designed to influence—ideally, UX metrics that can later be tied to business performance.

According to our 2024 Future of User Research Report, the most commonly-tracked UX metrics include:

If you're testing a redesigned onboarding flow, tracking task success rate and time on task can reveal how efficiently users complete setup.

If you're improving a checkout process, measuring drop-off rate and error rate helps identify whether changes reduce friction.

To make these metrics meaningful, you need a benchmark—something to measure against. Benchmarks could come from a previous version of the product, an earlier round of testing, or even from industry standards.

For example, if your baseline task success rate on mobile checkout is 58%, and a new design improves it to 78%, that 20% lift becomes a key input when quantifying ROI, especially if it correlates with higher conversions.

Once you’ve identified relevant UX metrics and established benchmarks, the next step is to connect those metrics to business outcomes.

UX metrics show how well a design performs, but to calculate ROI, you need to link those improvements to key performance indicators that the business already tracks.

Our Future of User Research Report 2025 found the top three goals for research projects are:

But those goals only gain traction when tied to KPIs like:

Here’s how the alignment could look in practice:

Mapping these UX metrics → business KPIs → potential business impact is a key part of translating return-on-experience to the ROI of UX research—and the value of UX as a whole. Instead of focusing on the investment, focus on the experience and its impact.

The next step is to gather actionable data that backs up your UX metrics = business impact story. You can pull data from a UX research repository, secondary research, or by using a purpose-built research platform like Maze.

Using Maze, you can gather data via:

Once you’ve got your user research data, you can calculate the ROI.

ROI is rarely a simple input-output equation—it requires a cost-benefit analysis that considers both direct and indirect business impact.

Geoffrey explains: “Say you make a design improvement, you need to frame exactly what impact it should have on the business side, like improving retention or reducing support phone calls, then calculate that new time earned into actual money.”

The standard cost-benefit formula still applies:

Here, ‘benefits’ might mean increased conversion rates, improved user satisfaction, higher retention, or operational savings like reduced support costs.
‘Cost’ could include researcher time, user testing tools, incentives, and other resources invested in the initiative.

For example:

Ultimately, a strong cost-benefit analysis of user research builds trust and an association with research → value.

*So how do you go about sharing these takeaways with stakeholders? *

Proving the ROI of research is important. But turning that proof into stakeholder buy-in depends on how you communicate it.

Stakeholders need credible, contextual evidence that shows research is driving meaningful business outcomes. Here’s how to present the results of your UX research in a way that decision-makers actually care about.

Stakeholders don’t just want results—they want relevance. When presenting ROI, bring it back to the original UX research plan.

Remind your audience what the team set out to learn, why they were doing it (e.g. to diagnose a problem in the conversion funnel), what decisions were dependent on the research, and what would have happened without research. Then show how those risks were reduced or avoided.

For example:
→ We set out to understand why users dropped off mid-sign-up
→ To understand what was causing conversion to drop
→ And determine how to improve conversion rate
→ We identified that the FAQ pop-up was diverting users away from the sign-up flow
→ We moved this pop-up to show during onboarding once sign-up was complete
→ This change led to a 20% increase in task success rate on sign-up

The fastest way to lose buy-in is by leading with usability scores and leaving the business impact vague.

Rather than focusing on what you found or what UX research method you used, focus on what results happened because of the change.

Translate your insights into metrics like:

For example, don’t say, ‘users were confused by the navigation, with task drop-off coming in at 75%.’ Say, ‘simplifying navigation added 1,000 conversions/month, equating to $1,000 monthly profit.’

User experience research may not always directly change a number in a spreadsheet. But it’s the catalyst that sets off a domino effect to larger impact.

As Geoffrey explains: “Great experiences drive long-term business value—even if the financial impact isn’t instantly visible. For example, a more accessible form may not show immediate revenue, but it increases your market and reduces legal risk.”

This might look like: fewer usability issues = less rework = faster shipping + stronger customer experience = improved profitability.

Map these domino effects clearly in your UX research reports and presentations communicating user research to stakeholders. Use one user journey, one quote, or one fix to show the ripple effect.

If you’re estimating ROI, back it up.

It’s easy to throw UX statistics around or guestimate results, but it’s critical that your figures add up—especially when value from user research is already a more abstract return-on-investment to illustrate.

Use trusted sources like Nielson Norman Group, Gartner, or Forrester to show what similar investments typically return. This strengthens your credibility and shows that your team understands the broader industry landscape.

Don't wait until the final moment to talk about ROI from UX research. Bring stakeholders into the UX research process early—during planning, during synthesis, and especially during alignment conversations.

Geoffrey recommends that you “use real user quotes, before/after scenarios, and customer journey maps to make the impact tangible. Reference industry standards or case studies to validate your assumptions.”

Starting the socialization of research insights, and surfacing the conversation around UX research impact early on is a key part of getting folks onboard. When people are part of the journey, they’re more likely to trust the outcome.

Seeing how other teams have translated insights into outcomes—faster launches, fewer mistakes, higher conversions—can help ground your own ROI story.

Here’s three examples of teams using Maze to drive measurable business impact through user research. Let them be your inspiration (or your proof!).

HqO, a B2B workplace experience platform, was under pressure to launch new features quickly—but their traditional, only-moderated research process was too slow. Each study took weeks of planning, participant recruitment, and analysis. As a result, research was often skipped, and features shipped based on assumptions.

To fix this, the team switched to Maze—specifically to embrace mixed methods research and add a layer of rapid unmoderated testing into their research stack. They sped up prototype testing, testing early concepts with real users, validated assumptions in under 48 hours, and collected heatmaps and user feedback without needing a full research sprint.

By moving fast with Maze, HqO:

Uxcel, a platform for design education and career growth, noticed a growing gap between signups and active users. As the product expanded from learning into skill testing and job search, the existing onboarding flow no longer reflected user needs, leading to low activation and missed opportunities for conversion.

To fix this, Uxcel turned to Maze. By combining prototype testing and UX surveys, the team gathered insights on user motivation and identified critical usability issues in the signup journey.

The insights were clear: nearly half of new users weren’t coming to learn—they were coming to get hired or test their skills, but the onboarding didn’t reflect that.

Using Maze, Uxcel launched a redesigned flow that asked users to select their goal upfront. The results:

Soda Studio, an Amsterdam-based UX & Product agency, noticed a steep drop-off in one client’s conversion funnel, costing them 35% of their potential sign-ups. Soda hypothesized that a tab bar in the app design was diverting users away from the intended flow mid-sign-up, negatively impacting completion rates.

But before making costly development changes, they needed data to prove their theory.
While traditional A/B testing would have required building and deploying multiple versions of the feature, the team used Maze to test their hypothesis at the design stage, before investing any resources into rewriting code.

Soda created two prototype variations—one with the tab bar and one without. They split tested participants and used heatmaps to track exactly where users clicked, and where they dropped off in the flow.

The results validated their hypothesis and provided clear direction for the final design:

By testing at the prototype stage, Soda saved their client from shipping a suboptimal design and avoided the costly cycle of building, launching, and then having to redesign based on poor performance metrics.

The ROI of user research is a mindset that helps you ask better questions, frame findings more strategically, and influence decisions at every stage of the product lifecycle.

If you want research to drive business value, you need to make your impact visible. Learn how to measure value, map it to KPIs, and make the ROI of user research undeniable.

That means making a business case for research, and thinking like a strategist, not just a researcher. If in doubt, bring it back to one prompt:

“If this research didn’t happen, what would the business have lost?”

That’s your ROI story. Start there, and build out.