Craft and Beauty: The ROI of Marrying Form and Function | Figma Blog (opens in new tab)

Craft and beauty are presented as business advantages, not merely aesthetic preferences. Leaders from Stripe, Linear, and Figma argue that thoughtful details improve usability, engagement, conversion, and product differentiation. Their examples—including a 20% increase in email conversion and 11.9% higher average revenue for Stripe Checkout users—show that investment in quality can directly support growth.

Craft Improves Usability and Conversion

• Beauty can make products feel easier and more effective, an effect known as the aesthetic usability effect.
• Clearer language, stronger visual hierarchy, and a smoother journey helped Stripe increase conversion from an email series by 20%.
• Every user touchpoint can either add or subtract value from the overall product experience.
• Stripe’s Optimized Checkout Suite, whose quality and detail were key priorities, helped businesses generate 11.9% more revenue on average.

Craft as a Mindset, Beauty as the Result

• Linear’s Karri Saarinen distinguishes between:
  • Craft: the mindset and care applied while creating something.
  • Beauty: the visible experience and quality that result.
• Quality extends beyond appearance. A well-designed object or product should function smoothly, reliably, and pleasantly.
• The central question is whether a team is committed to doing excellent work or merely completing tasks as quickly as possible.

Performance and Quality Are Foundational

• Figma views product quality as a hierarchy of needs.
• Fundamental qualities such as web performance and a consistent 60 frames-per-second experience must come first.
• These technical foundations enable users to appreciate higher-level design and interaction details.
• Craft also involves making products feel intuitive—so well-designed that users feel everything simply works.

Craft Requires a Company-Wide Culture

• Craft is not the responsibility of a single design team; engineering, product, design, and other functions all contribute.
• Figma and Linear emphasize that quality should be an inherent cultural value rather than something enforced only through OKRs.
• Stripe uses “friction logging” and multidisciplinary “walking the store” exercises, in which teams experience the product end to end as users do.
• This approach helps teams identify and remove problems across the full customer journey.

The practical recommendation is to treat craft as an organization-wide operating principle. Companies should invest in performance, clarity, usability, and detail at every touchpoint, because form and function together can create both a better experience and measurable business results.