Connect the Dots: Why Businesses Can't See the Value of Design

Fiction story frameworks aren’t effective for telling a UX story

Photo by Darina Belonogova: https://www.pexels.com/photo/a-woman-filming-herself-using-a-video-camera-7208965/

“You have to speak to ‘Why should they care?’ before anything else.”

This advice, given by a Design Consultant, is why most UX storytelling advice falls flat.

You’ve probably read dozens of articles about the importance of storytelling. You’ve studied the frameworks. You’ve crafted your narrative.

But your portfolio still isn’t landing. Your presentations fall flat. And it’s not because your UX work is bad.

It’s because you’re using the wrong storytelling framework.

The Problem With Story Frameworks

When it comes to storytelling, there are only 3 types of stories:

• Stories that educate

• Stories that entertain

• Stories that inspire

But these are never mentioned when you hear “Storytelling” in UX. Instead, specific frameworks always come up:

• The Hero’s Journey

• Story Mountain

• Three-act structure

• Story spline

So you might take one of these frameworks and craft a narrative arc:

1. “I started with a research plan”

2. “I interviewed 15 participants”

3. “I synthesized the findings”

4. “I created these designs”

5. “And here’s what we should do next”

But your audience is likely to check out after the first few minutes.

Why? Because entertainment frameworks don’t work for informational content.

The hero’s journey? That’s designed to keep people reading novels. In fiction, it’s fine to spend 50 pages describing how hard it is to walk after coming out of cryostasis.

But that’s not the story your team needs to hear. They’re here to be informed about your findings (and how they can solve their business problem), and be inspired to make decisions about the future.

To do that, they don’t need to hear about your process. They hired you to handle the UX process, just like they hired developers to code and salespeople to sell.

What they need to know is: What did you find, and what should we do about it?

So what you need to do is make a bold statement first, then justify it.

What works better for businesses: Bold statement, then justify

Instead of walking your audience through your journey, what often works better is to put your conclusions at the beginning.

Start with the boldest, most important statement you can make, then justify it. This is how you get decision-makers (especially executives) to pay attention.

Let me show you what this looks like in practice.

Example 1: The Checkout Problem

Traditional UX framing: “I conducted usability testing with 5 participants on our product and checkout workflow.

During these sessions, 3 out of 5 users struggled with the checkout task.

Based on my analysis, I identified that the lack of form field defaults was the primary issue, and I think we should add these defaults.”

Bold statement framing: “We’re unlikely to meet our $500,000 quarterly revenue goal because 55% of users abandon checkout due to missing field defaults.

If we implement smart defaults, we can recover $150,000 in lost revenue each month.”

See the difference?

The first version makes you the hero of a long, winding research journey. This is a ‘process narrative’ that describes how you did your job and what you found from a UX perspective.

The second talks about the larger business problem and positions your solution as the fix. It immediately begs the question “Why?”, which draws your audience’s attention into how you’ll be able to justify that statement with logic.

So how do you make these bold statements?

The Anatomy of Bold Statement Framing

Let’s break down how this actually works:

Step 1: Lead With the Business Outcome

Many designers feel like they can’t make a bold claim because they’re only sure about the “UX” side of things.

However, understanding the qualitative aspect helps you understand the bigger picture more than you realize — with just two words: “So what?”

Let’s take one example and see how we can turn it into a business outcome:

• “2 out of 5 users audibly sighed when they were forced to type in form fields during checkout.” So what?

• “Doing extra typing means completing checkout takes longer and is more tedious. So what?

• “It’s likely that many users are stalling out because they don’t have time to fill everything in. For example, they’re on their phone and can’t fill it in while waiting in line.” So what?

• “We’re losing a certain percentage of users due to these extra fields.” So what?

• “Hitting our quarterly business goal is harder because of this issue.”

It’s through the logic of “So what?” that you can trace back how UX issues impact business outcomes.

“But I don’t know what our business goals are!”

Sometimes you may know more than you think. Have you ever:

• Been invited to a meeting where the PM lays out the quarter’s roadmap?

• Sat in a town hall or organizational meeting where they talk about what’s coming next?

• Attended an Agile planning session where the PM laid out work for the next sprint?

In that case, you might be able to put together a statement like:

• “I know we’re working on Project X right now, and we need to get it done in Y weeks to serve Z users.”

The only thing you need to do then is follow up with a decision-maker and ask one question:

• “How are we measuring success for this project?”

Whether it’s “our paying customer is happy and continues paying us” or “we want to get 50,000 new users to sign up for our product,” there’s often a business outcome you can speak to.

Step 2: Quantify Impact Whenever Possible

Numbers make bold statements credible. They transform opinions into facts.

But sometimes you may be unsure how to find these numbers. Let’s take the statement we wrote above:

• “We’re losing a certain percentage of users due to these extra fields.”

Our argument is: “Because it takes longer to fill out checkout fields and complete an order, X% of our users drop off.”

The easiest way to quantify this is to look at the analytics (or ask someone to). See how many people are dropping off during the checkout process, and you’re done.

But sometimes it’s not that easy. Whether you don’t have the numbers or your stakeholders are blocking access, you might have to look elsewhere. Here are other ways to quantify things:

Scale

It’s very likely that someone knows how many customers go through the checkout process.

Being able to say “This issue affects all 50,000 users who go through checkout” is another way of speaking about impact.

Productivity

Another approach (often combined with scale) is to talk about productivity as a proxy measure. This is most often used for B2B products where productivity is a focus.

If checking out takes 6 minutes instead of 2, you can say: “4 minutes × 50,000 users = this issue is costing users 200,000 minutes of their time — that’s 3,333 hours or 4.6 months of cumulative user time lost.”

Segmentation

Lastly, you can talk about user segments. The idea is: “This issue is particularly bad for one user segment: parents with children. That segment makes up 68% of our total audience, so we need to fix this issue.”

Step 3: Connect the Dots Explicitly

Don’t make your audience do math. Don’t make them infer the connection between UX problems and business impact. Tell them directly.

Implicit connection (weak): “Users don’t like having to fill out fields that can be autopopulated. We need to add these defaults to fix that.”

Explicit connection (strong): “Users having to fill out basic information in fields means the process takes 3× as long, and we lose X% of users at checkout.

We’re losing $150,000 in sales each month due to this extra work.”

See the difference? You’re not just identifying a UX problem. You’re drawing a straight line from that problem to lost customers to lost revenue.

Why This Works: The Psychology of Decision-Making

Executives and stakeholders don’t have time for narrative arcs. They make decisions based on:

1. Is there a problem? (Your bold statement)

2. How big is the problem? (Your quantification)

3. What’s the solution? (Your recommendation)

4. What’s the ROI? (Your justification)

That’s it. Four questions.

If you can answer these in the first 30 seconds of your presentation, you’ve got their attention.

Everything else, your research process, your methodology, your beautiful journey, is just supporting documentation.

The Reframing Exercise

Take any piece of UX work you’ve done recently and try this exercise:

Step 1: Write down the traditional way you’d present it (research → findings → recommendations)

Step 2: Identify the single most important piece for the business

Step 3: Ask “So what?” until you’re able to identify the business outcome

Step 4: Rewrite, starting with that impact as your opening line

Step 5: Add the justification (your research findings)

When Bold Statements Don’t Work

There are times when this framework isn’t appropriate:

1. Exploratory Research Presentations: If you’re sharing generative research where the goal is to build empathy and understanding, not drive immediate action, you might need more storytelling and less bold statement framing.

2. Design Critiques: When you’re getting feedback from other designers in a critique setting, process and craft matter more than business impact.

3. Early-Stage Discovery If you’re still figuring out the problem space, you might not have enough data yet for bold statements. That’s okay, just be clear you’re in discovery mode.

But for everything else, portfolios, stakeholder presentations, research readouts, design proposals, and bold statement framing will dramatically increase your impact.

You don’t need to be a superhero. You need to advise your team

The uncomfortable truth is that in UX communication, you’re not the protagonist.

You may be smart and charismatic. But businesses pay you because they don’t want to hear about all your UX processes.

The business problem is the protagonist. Your role is to illuminate it, explain it, and help solve it.

Once you stop trying to take your audience on a narrative journey and start giving them what they actually came for, everything changes.

Your presentations land. Your portfolio gets callbacks. Your research findings actually get implemented.

Not because your UX work got better, but because you learned to make bold statements first and justify them second.

Want to learn how to tell a story? Book a free 30-minute fit call to talk through where you are and what’s next.

I rewrite portfolios for Senior, Lead, Staff, and Principal designers. I write about what I see in the Data and Design Newsletter, and help designers tell the story of why their work matters: to land jobs, get buy-in, and reach the next level.