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How UX Generates Immediate Business Impact and Drives Growth
Sep 28, 2025
Introduction: Growth Is Not Just Marketing
Company growth is often associated to marketing budgets, viral campaigns, or referral programs. Since marketing campaigns are generating traffic, most people view a successful company almost entirely from this perspective. This view is not wrong, but in my eyes it is incomplete.
As Sean Ellis and Morgan Brown describe in Hacking Growth, growth is not a single measure taken. It is not a single hack. It is a repeatable process that runs through the entire customer journey. From the first impression to long-term loyalty, every interaction matters and drives a successful product forward into sustainable growth.
In my opinion the fastest and most sustainable growth lever does not sit in ads or discounts. It sits inside the product itself: in the user experience.
The UX-Growth Connection
The link between user experience and growth becomes clear when you look at the classic growth funnel: Acquisition → Activation → Retention → Referral → Revenue.
Acquisition: A landing page that builds trust leads to more signups. A confusing one wastes ad spend.
Activation: Smooth onboarding converts curiosity into active users quickly. Especially here, friction can kill momentum before it even gain traction.
Retention: A clear interface that creates value for a user makes it easy to come back and succeed again. Complexity drives indeciciveness.
Referral: People only share products they actually enjoy. Value creates referrals.
Revenue: Every unnecessary click or unclear message blocks conversion. Simplicity drives sales.
Ellis and Brown put it simply: "Companies that obsess over user experience win because they make it easier for users to succeed."
Why UX Generates Immediate Business Impact
The reason UX is such a powerful lever is because of its longevity. Marketing campaigns stop working the moment you cut the budget. UX improvements, on the other hand, compound over time. Every new visitor benefits from the change.
And the effects are measurable immediately:
An increase in conversion rate translates directly into more revenue.
A reduction in onboarding drop-off creates more active users right away.
An Augmentation of the general UX converts into returning customers.
Take decentralized finance (DeFi) as an example. If a wallet connection fails, all following potential trades never happen. With millions of monthly users, even a 1% drop-off can equal millions in lost trading volume. And in e-commerce, a simplified checkout can add thousands of sales within days.
These are not long-term brand building effects. They are instantly visible.
Case Insights: When UX = Growth
The connection between UX and growth becomes tangible when you look at real products:
Jupiter (DeFi): Hidden wallet options created drop-offs at the very first step. Even small failures at this stage equal millions in lost trades.
PancakeSwap (DeFi): Almost 900,000 active wallets but relatively little capital locked in. Feature overload, few trust elements and unclear priorities made it harder for users to commit.
Raydium (DeFi): A clean interface, but recurring glitches without explanations left users frustrated and suspicious. Trust lost = volume lost.
These platforms are not niche projects. They are category leaders. And yet, even their growth can be visibly shaped by seemingly small UX details.
Apply an UX Impact Formula
Here's a way to measure wether your efforts are actually driving business impact and its strength lies in its simplicity:
Traffic × Conversion Rate × Retention × Avg. Revenue/User = Business Impact
It allows any product team to translate design decisions into measurable outcomes. Here is how you can apply it yourself:
Start with your current traffic.
Look at the number of unique visitors (or active wallets, if you’re in DeFi). This gives you the baseline of potential users entering your funnel.Measure conversion at the first critical step.
How many visitors actually complete the initial action? In DeFi that might be a wallet connection; in e-commerce it could be adding an item to the cart.Factor in retention.
One-time conversions are fragile. How many of those users come back tomorrow, next week, or next month?Add average revenue per user (ARPU).
Multiply the retained users by the average value they generate. This translates UX directly into financial terms.
When you plug in your own numbers, even small changes in conversion or retention quickly show their monetary impact. Improving a drop-off rate by just 1% can mean thousands, or in DeFi, even millions of dollars in preserved value.
Example: Calculating UX Impact
Let’s assume the following numbers for a platform:
Traffic: 100,000 monthly visitors
Conversion Rate: 5% (5,000 users take the first key action, e.g. connect a wallet or sign up)
Retention: 40% (2,000 users come back regularly)
Average Revenue per User (ARPU): $50
Business Impact = 100,000 × 5% × 40% × $50
= $10,000,000 in monthly revenue
Now imagine improving the conversion rate from 5% to 6% through a clearer onboarding flow.
Business Impact = 100,000 × 6% × 40% × $50
= $12,000,000
A 1% increase in conversion equals an additional $2,000,000 per month.
This shows how even small UX improvements translate into significant financial outcomes.
Conclusion: UX Is a Growth Engine
Growth is not luck. It is systematic. UX is one of the strongest levers in that system, because it generates immediate, sustainable and measurable business impact if applied correctly.
Companies that still treat UX as a cost center are leaving money on the table. Companies that treat UX as their growth engine scale faster, retain more users, and build trust that compounds over time.
If you want to uncover how much growth potential your UX is hiding, let’s connect.