Financial & Enterprise
Design ROI Calculator
The business case for design, as a tool
By Hiram BarskyFounder & Principal Designer
Role
Product Design · Full-stack · AI
Timeframe
2026
Published
August 2026
Outcome
Live at roicalc.site
Built with
In-house, AI-assisted · Figma Design · Claude Code · Netlify
The result
Live at roicalc.site: enter your before-and-after design metrics and get a defensible business case — total value, ROI, payback, a transparent calculation, conservative-to-optimistic pressure-tests, and CFO / CPO / CEO talking points ready to paste.
Overview
“Prove the ROI of design” is the hardest ask in the field — and most designers answer it with a screenshot and a hopeful adjective. This tool answers it in the language budgets are actually decided in: enter your before-and-after metrics and it returns total business value, ROI, payback, and a pitch you can hand a CFO.
The problem
Design loses budget arguments it should win, because the argument happens in finance terms and designers show up with craft. A portfolio proves you can do the work; it doesn’t prove the work was worth the money. Without a defensible number — revenue, payback, a model that survives scrutiny — “good design” stays a matter of taste, and taste gets cut first.
Research
Talk to designers about proving their value and the same three walls show up every time — none of them about the design itself.
Design gets cut in rooms it isn’t in
Budget decisions happen in finance language. Craft screenshots don’t translate; revenue, payback, and ROI do.
→ Drove: Outputs framed as business value and payback — not before/after mockups.
Borrowed stats get dismissed
Generic ‘$100 back for every $1’ claims collapse under one skeptical question. The number has to be yours.
→ Drove: Your own before/after inputs plus a visible calculation methodology, so the figure is defensible.
A number isn’t a pitch
Even a strong ROI figure dies without a narrative — and each stakeholder cares about a different thing.
→ Drove: Tailored CFO / CPO / CEO talking points, plus scenario modeling to disarm “what if you’re wrong?”
The approach
- 1
Turned the whole business case into a fill-in model: two numbers — traffic and average order value — scale everything, then you enter each UX metric before and after (conversion, task success, satisfaction, accessibility) and the tool computes revenue, cost savings, payback, and ROI.
- 2
Made it honest by design, because a number no one can check gets waved away. It loads a worked sample so you see the output first, labels every template value as illustrative — not a measured average — and shows the exact calculation, so the result reads as evidence, not a boast.
- 3
Built the last mile most calculators skip: sensitivity analysis that names which metric actually drives the result, scenario modeling (conservative / realistic / optimistic) to pre-empt pushback, and stakeholder talking points tailored to a CFO, CPO, and CEO — ready to paste.
Our thought process
The hardest sentence in design is “here’s what it was worth.” we built the tool we always wished we had walking into a budget meeting — one that turns a designer’s outcomes into a case a finance team can’t hand-wave away.
What didn't work
The first version just spat out one big number. It got waved away — a figure with no method reads as a guess, and a guess loses to a spreadsheet. The turning point was making the math visible and forcing real inputs: trust came from transparency and ‘these are YOUR numbers,’ not from a bigger, bolder total.
The outcome
A shipped, live tool that takes a designer from “I improved conversion” to “$1.8M in business value, a 41x return, six-day payback — and here’s the CFO version of that sentence.” The business case for design, no longer improvised in the meeting.
What this means for your project
Struggling to prove design’s value — to your leadership, a board, a client? That’s the exact problem we obsess over. We turn UX outcomes into the language budgets are decided in: revenue, payback, and a model a finance team can’t wave away.
“He takes charge of any situation and sees any task through to the end. I recommend Hiram for any project as the Lead UX Designer.”
