Bad UI is not merely an aesthetic grievance. It is an operational tax applied to every single action a user takes within your system.
Compounding Friction
If a highly paid biostatistician or financial analyst has to spend three extra minutes per task fighting a dense dashboard, that friction scales across their entire day. Multiply that across a 500-person department. You are losing millions in productivity because engineering refused to prioritize interface clarity.
Design is leverage. Clean, structured, highly-intentional UI is one of the highest ROI investments an enterprise can make, converting wasted cognitive cycles back into core competency work.