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Usability is good business

Quick facts

• $1 spent up front saves $10 during development and $100 after release
• Reduce development time by 33-50%
• Reduce need for training by at least 25%
• Reduce call centre volume by up to 66%
• Increase customer satisfaction
• Increased revenues and customer retention
• Huge reduction in errors
• Increased productivity
• Avoid costly design flaws before you start coding.

A large proportion of the code for your site or application deals with the interface. It pays to get it right before a line of code is written.

"Once a system is in development, correcting a problem costs 10 times as much as fixing the same problem in design. If the system has been released, it costs 100 times as much relative to fixing in design."

- Gilb, Principles of software engineering management, 1988.

Reduced development costs and faster speed to market

If you build in the users’ needs early enough in the development cycle, you can avoid a huge number of design flaws. This is how you can reduce your development costs so dramatically, and reduce rework and maintenance costs.

"If you make sure you get the interface right, you can reduce the time it takes to develop your product by over 33-50%."

- Bosert, Quality functional deployment, in Bias, RG and Mayhew, DJ (eds), Cost-Justifying Usability, 1991.

"63% of software exceed their estimates, with the top four reasons all related to product usability:

• frequent requests for changes by users
• overlooked tasks
• users' lack of understanding of their own requirements, and
• insufficient user-analyst communication and understanding."

- Lederer and Prassad, in Bias, RG and Mayhew, DJ (eds), Cost-Justifying Usability, 1991.

Reduce testing and quality assurance costs

With better initial designs and prototype usability testing, you can pick up problems much earlier in the development process. It's also easier to prioritise changes, since you have information about what customers value.

Lower sales costs and shorter sales cycles

If your site or application is easy to use, it's easier to achieve your organisational goals, whether that’s higher revenue, reduced costs or increased awareness, etc.

An easy-to-use product lets customers easily see the value for them is better than your competitor's products. If it has fewer unneeded features, and is easier to use, it takes less time to set up, requires little or no training and will not require time for the user to get up to speed.

All of these things can be strong selling points for your product, driving loyalty and repeat business.

Decrease production costs while improving profit

A more effective, user-centred design often means eliminating unnecessary features and procedures. A product would need fewer parts and manufacturing, a site needs less back-end development, and an application requires less code.

Less service and support, lower maintenance costs

If a site, application or product is easier to use, it’s easier to support and requires less training. Fewer service calls will be logged.

"Norwich Union, an insurance company in Australia, found that calls to its help desk were reduced by two thirds after one of its core applications was improved by using user-centred design techniques introduced by The Hiser Group."

- Norwich Rethinks Customer Service. Computer World, 24 November 1995.

"Systems designed with usability engineering have typically reduced the time needed for training by around 25%."

- Landauer, T K (1995) The Trouble with Computers, Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, pp 227.

"Eighty percent of software life cycle costs are incurred after the product is released, in the maintenance phase. Of that work, 80% is due to unmet or unseen user requirements; only 20% of this is due to bugs or reliability problems."

- Ko, C & Hurley, M (1995) Managing End-User Computing. In information Management and Computer Security 3 (3), pp 3-5.

"The single largest predictor of call center volume is your web site’s usability. Calls cost an average $22-$30 per call."

- Professional usability testing and return on investment as it applies to user interface design for web-based products and services, Mauro C, AM+A, 2002.

"It is about 40-100 times more expensive to fix problems in the maintenance phase of a program than in the design phase."

- Boehm, B W (1981) Software Engineering Economics. New Jersey: Prentice-Hall Inc.

Higher efficiency and productivity gains

"User-centred design typically cuts errors in user-system interaction from 5 percent down to 1 percent."

- Landauer, T K (1995) The Trouble with Computers, Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, pp 227.

Some examples

Hewlett-Packard 

User-centred design methods were applied to redesign HP software used for identifying network problems:

- Serco Usability Services, UK.

In addition to the benefits to customers, HP recovered their costs in 18 months.

Wizard

After The Hiser Group redesigned Wizard’s web site in 2001, they more than doubled the revenue for home loan applications through the site within three months.

IBM

"Design changes due to usability work at IBM resulted in an average reduction of 9.6 minutes per task, with projected internal savings at IBM of $6.8 Million in 1991 alone. "

- Karat, CM. (1990). Cost-benefit analysis of usability engineering techniques, in Proceedings of the Human Factors Society 34th Annual Meeting –1990. Human Factors Society, Santa Monica, California, 839-843.

New York Stock Exchange

After the New York Stock Exchange upgraded its core trading systems using user-centred design techniques, productivity rose dramatically and users’ error rates fell by a factor of 10 even though workloads more than doubled.

- Gibbs, W W (1997) Taking Computers To Task. Scientific America, July 1997 Issue.

Increased customer satisfaction

"Revenues for one DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation) product that was developed using user-centred design techniques increased 80% for the new version of the software, and usability was cited by customers as the second most significant improvement."

- Wixon, D & Jones, S (1995) Usability for Fun and Profit: A Case Study of the Design of DEC Rally Ver 2. In Rudisill, M et al, Human-Computer Interface Design: Success Stories, Emerging Methods and Real-World. Context. San Francisco, CA: Morgan Kaufmann, pp3-35.

More information

Return on Investment for Usable User-Interface Design: Examples and Statistics, Marcus, A, 2002. http://www.amanda.com/resources/ROI/AMA_ROIWhitePaper_28Feb02.pdf (103KB)

Cost-Justifying Usability. Bias, RG and Mayhew, DJ (eds), 1994.