FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
Why is usability important at all?
Because systems that lack usability cost money! Here are some of the most common damages of bad usability:
- Failed products, user errors, and time lost
- Poor conversion rates, increase in service calls and customer support
- Increase in employee turnover, training and user support costs
- Increase in both development and maintenance time and costs
What is the return on investment (ROI) of usability?
Usability improves customer services and increases organizational efficiencies. Usable systems:
- Lead to better user experience, decrease errors and improve user efficiencies
- Attract more customers and increase job satisfaction
- Significantly reduce the needs in training and user support
- Save both development and maintenance time and costs
How can usability align with business goals?
By improving both user and organizational efficiencies, usability can support different business goals such as:
- Improve quality of products and customer services
- Reduce running and development costs
- Increase user productivity
- Increase sales, traffic, market share, etc.
What then stands in the way of usability?
Usability is misunderstood and its ROI awfully underestimated
in the industry. The teaching of usability as a discipline of Computer Science
or a software development method is not yet mainstream at university level.
Consequently, usability is frequently mistaken with computer graphics or
reduced to compliance with guidelines. Here are some of the most
common myths about usability:
- “We know the users. They do not need better interfaces, but more training.”
- Training and documentation can solve a multitude of usability flaws.
- Usability is just common sense.
- Usability is subjective and cannot be measured.
- Usability awareness is all you need to design good user interfaces.
- User interface design should not be taken into account until the final design phase.
- Usability and user-centered design will increase development costs.
- Usability and user-centered design will increase development time and time to market.
- Usability will blow out budgets.
- Usability engineering will conflict with the development methodology.
Why argue for strategic usability?
Because the more strategic the usability, the more the
savings! Strategic is here opposed to reactive, sporadic and scattered. Specifically,
reactive use of usability science significantly reduces its ROI because
usability efforts occur too late: either after a failed product or once
usability problems already damaged customer trust or negatively affected organizational
efficiencies. The ROI of usability significantly increases as it is employed as
a strategic asset, namely:
- Early in the development lifecycle (see Figure 1)
- With dedicated tools, facilities and staff
- In alignment with business goals
Figure 1 – Current trend in the application of usability science (Bias and Mayhew, 2005).
Stats and facts
- "The rule of the thumb in many usability-aware organizations is that the cost benefit ratio for usability is $1: $10-$100. 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, 1988)
- "80% of software lifecycle costs occur during the maintanance phase and were associated with 'unmet or unforseen' user requirements and other usability problems." (Nielsen, 1993)
- "Approximately 63% of large software projects are over budget and the top four reasons rated as having the highest responsability were related to usability engineering." (Nielsen, 1993)
- "Inadequate use of usability engineering methods in software development projects have been estimated to cost the US economy about $30 billion per year in lost productivity." (Landauer, 1995)
- "The average user interface has some 40 flaws. Correcting the easiest 20 of these yields an average improvement in usability of 50%. The big win, however, occurs when usability is factored in from the beginning. This can yield efficiency improvements of over 700%." (Landauer, 1995)
- "Sun Microsystems has shown how spending about $20,000 could yield a savings of $152 million dollars. Each and every dollar invested could return $7,500 in savings." (Rhodes, 2000)
- "You can increase sales on your site as much as 225% by providing sufficient product information to your customers at the right time. In our recent research, we found that the design of product lists directly affected sales. On sites that did not require shoppers to bounce back-and-forth between the list and individual product pages, visitors added more products to their shopping cart and had a more positive opinion of the site. By understanding your customer expectations and needs, and designing your product lists accordingly, you can significantly increase your sales." (UI Engineering, 2001)
- “In traditional software, and even more so in large E-com web development efforts, about 5% offeatures available to the customer are used 95% of the time. A more staggering statistic is thefact that some 70% of user-interface design features are never or rarely used.” (Mauro, 2002)
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