Designing and developing takes time, and quite often design elements get squeezed and pushed back down the priority list because often there’s no clear value to spending time on this rather than something that is seen as more ‘critical’ to the project timeline.
It can also be frustrating for non-designers to see time and effort spent on something they don’t understand, especially if they’re keen to launch a product or feature.
Providing evidence of the value of design is key to ensuring that this doesn’t happen. This isn’t always easy.
You can collect data to show how users react to UI, usually this takes the form of qualitative interviews and observations, but it’s sometimes difficult at the stage of planning and design to get across how important spending this time is.
Emotion is large component of design, how an interface makes your user feel has a significant impact on how they recall that experience later on and their lasting impressions of your system.
If an interface is frustrating to use, but the user is able to complete the task despite this, what they’ll remember most is the frustration they experienced - not that the task was completed.
Spending time ensuring that an interface is as frustration free as possible is important to ensuring user satisfaction - but it’s similiarly important to provide efforts over and above a ‘just good enough’ effort to positively impact user attitudes toward systems.