Designers often do invisible work that matters. Here’s how to show it
What matters in an AI-integrated UX department? Highlighting invisible work
“Partnering with data and making our process visible are essential for impactful design. When we work transparently, we build trust and credibility across the organization.”
A Head of AI Strategy and Design told me last week, which reflects UX’s changing nature.
UX professionals have always had some measure of ‘invisible work’. Whether it’s creating personas that only get seen occasionally or making design iterations, much of our work goes unnoticed.
But as businesses increasingly question the value of UX, there’s a growing need to signal not only that you’ve done work, but that it impacts the business’s bottom line.
This is where many designers struggle.
The Uncomfortable Truth About How Businesses See Design
At its core, businesses hire employees to do one of two things: make more money or save money. That’s why their perception of UX tends to be flawed.
Sales teams obviously bring in revenue. Marketing draws direct lines between campaigns and business outcomes.
Project management keeps things under budget and on time. Engineering tackles performance issues that directly impact the bottom line.
But design? Design often looks like the “idea person” in the room.
There’s a connection between ‘pleasing customers with good UX’ and these two categories, but employers aren’t quite sure how it impacts the bottom line.
“It’s always been a really hard thing for design to attribute their hard work to revenue… You can make the most amazingly satisfying user experience. But if you’re not bringing in any revenue out of that, you’re not going to have a job for very much longer. The company’s not going to succeed.” — Design Manager
This perception problem has always existed, but the pressure to integrate AI into processes has made it critical.
When AI can generate a visual representation of stakeholder ideas that “looks okay,” the question becomes unavoidable: what do we need designers for?
The answer? To deal with reality.
The Story No One Tells About UX
UX is messy. That’s why people hire you.
Think about the network engineer who seems to sit around doing nothing… until an emergency hits, and she’s the first person to jump into action.
She’s the troubleshooter. The person who understands the system well enough to know what’s actually going wrong and how to fix it. This is increasingly what we do in UX.
Our research spots user friction points before they become critical problems. Our design intuition flags solutions that might cause issues for customers down the line.
We understand why things break and how to iterate toward something that actually works.
The only problem? Because we’re not pointing out our invisible work, we look like we’re occupying space and taking too much time to build visuals.
Businesses don’t need to know every step of our design process. But they need to know why UX takes time when AI seems to generate visuals in minutes.
This is where connecting users and business needs becomes critical. Being able to say, “I know you’re concerned about our 70% abandonment rate at checkout. Here’s the most likely reason from interviewing users, and how to fix it,” can be essential in showcasing your value.
Why? Because UX is increasingly becoming the ‘glue’ that holds things together.
The Three Pillars of UX (And Which One Matters Most Now)
The role of UX has traditionally been threefold:
Remove friction through usability testing and research
Innovate through user insights and competitive analysis
Translate between user needs, business objectives, and technical possibilities
All three remain essential. But that third role, being the glue, is about to become critical.
Why? Because if we accept that AI will be integral to how businesses work, we must accept that this technology is unknown and often unpredictable.
Businesses need someone who can consider the messy business problem, user trust issues around AI, and the overall user experience, and still deliver on what users need.
To do that, you need to make invisible work visible through measurable value:
Strategic behavioral insights that connect user actions to business outcomes
UX-driven AI efficiencies (and cost savings) through rapid prototyping, customer insights on demand, and lean decision-making
Translation work that explains complex user research in terms of revenue and cost
Notice what’s missing? Pixel-pushing. Visual polish. Making things “look nice.”
Those things still matter, but they’re increasingly the commoditized part that AI can handle. The strategic work, understanding why users behave the way they do and what that means for the business, remains uniquely human.
How to Get Started with Making Invisible Work Visible
Before we get to the broader strategy, here’s something you can do in your very next stakeholder meeting.
The next time you present two different design solutions, stop and ask yourself:
What’s going to help convince our stakeholders to choose an option?
What often happens is that designers know the reason why… in design terms. Whether it’s ‘aligning with a 12-column grid’ or ‘the Gestalt principle of proximity’, you know an explanation that would bore the audience.
What you might not know is how to translate those explanations. One of the best places to start is talking about user behavior change.
Instead of: “Option A follows the Gestalt principle of proximity.”
Try: “Option A reduces checkout from 5 to 3 steps, making it much easier for users to complete their purchase instead of abandoning their cart.”
Notice the difference? You’re not asking “which looks better?” You’re demonstrating that you understand the business problem, the user problem, and can predict outcomes based on behavioral patterns.
This is invisible work becoming visible.
Do this once, and stakeholders will start seeing you differently. Do it consistently, and you become indispensable.
Making Your Work Speak to Business Needs
In an AI-integrated design future, it’s not about creating visuals anymore.
It’s about making the shift from execution to strategy, and surfacing all the invisible work that otherwise gets ignored.
You’re already doing the work as part of your process, but showcasing how that work drives business value is the next critical step.
Why? Because the future of UX lies in being the glue holding together what the technology can do, what users actually need, and what the business is trying to achieve.
UX professionals will be the troubleshooters who spot problems before they become expensive mistakes. They’ll be the people who understand not just what users do, but why they do it — and how to turn that understanding into measurable business outcomes.
That invisible work? It’s about to become your most valuable asset.
You just need to learn how to make it visible.
Kai Wong is a Senior Product Designer and Data and Design newsletter author. He teaches a course, Data Informed Design: How to Translate Why Design Work Matters, which helps designers communicate their value and get buy-in for ideas.
Thanks Kai. I wonder how these techniques can be translated at the leadership level? One thing that I've been struggling with as a leader is how to get our work noticed beyond EPD (engineering, product, design). Product management is talking to customers and GTM teams, while engineering is delivering. We're in the messy middle making sense of it all.