Cost Justifying Usability Engineering

Ordinary user errors, such as entering commands incorrectly or pressing the wrong function key, can cut into productivity. More serious user errors, such as inadvertently deleting data, or entering data incorrectly, can be very costly, resulting in real financial loss. Suppose, for example, that 12 serious errors (each costing an average of 10 minutes to make, discover, and recover from) per user per year could be identified and eliminated through usability engineering. If there were 250 users, this would result in a savings of 12.5 person weeks per year.

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Cost Justifying Usability Engineering
Problem: LOW PRODUCTIVITY	Problem: HIGH CUSTOMER SUPPORT COSTS
Solution: Usability Engineering	Solution: Usability Engineering
Poor user interface design can have a significant effect on user productivity. Consider a very simple transaction, such as filling in an on-line data entry form. Suppose an organization has 20 users, who perform this transaction approximately 80 times a day (quite typical for data entry clerks or other high frequency users). This adds up to 368,000 transactions per year (20 users working 230 days a year, performing 80 transactions per day). If a screen could be redesigned to reduce the transaction time per screen by 10 seconds, a savings of 1022 hours, or 25.5 person-weeks could be realized. If improvement on a single screen of the system could increase productivity by 1/2 a person-year, clearly improvements across the whole application would have a very dramatic effect on productivity.	Poorly designed user interfaces carry a cost not only in customer satisfaction, but also in real overhead in customer support. Supporting customers with trouble-shooting and data recovery can be very expensive. Designing a less confusing and less error-prone interface can reduce the need for customer support. For example, suppose a vendor has 600 customer organizations, whose users call in for help and need an average of 15 minutes per call to solve their problems. And, suppose 4 calls per customer per year could be eliminated by engineering a more usable interface. This represents a savings in customer support time of 15 weeks per year.
Problem: LOW WEB SITE CONVERSION RATES	Problem: CAPTURING/MAINTAINING A COMPETITIVE EDGE
Solution: Usability Engineering	Solution: Usability Engineering
Many e-commerce web sites fail to reach the business goals that would have cost-justified their development because a lack of basic usability means customers can't find the products they want, can't get the product information they want, and/or can't successfully complete the check out process on-line. A usability engineering program that increased the buy-to-look ratio on a web site by 3% of its current monthly traffic of 125,000 and average product profit margin of $10 could pay for itself in 8 months and generate a net return on investment (ROI) of over $100,000 in the first year alone.	In the past, vendors competed for product sales by increasing functionality, performance, reliability and support, and decreasing cost. More recently however, a new aspect of software has emerged as a dimension of competitive edge: the quality of the user interface. Suppose the profit margin on a software product was $100, and 250 more systems would be sold if the user interface was more competitive. This additional usability would then be worth $25,000.
Problem: HIGH TRAINING COSTS	Problem: COSTLY USER ERRORS
Solution: Usability Engineering	Solution: Usability Engineering
Training courses for new applications typically run between 3 days and 2 weeks. Suppose a company has 20 users, and each one must learn to use two new systems a year. If the training time per user could be reduced by 1.5 days through easier-to-learn user interfaces and/or better user documentation, then a savings of 60 days, or 12 person weeks would be realized.	Ordinary user errors, such as entering commands incorrectly or pressing the wrong function key, can cut into productivity. More serious user errors, such as inadvertently deleting data, or entering data incorrectly, can be very costly, resulting in real financial loss. Suppose, for example, that 12 serious errors (each costing an average of 10 minutes to make, discover, and recover from) per user per year could be identified and eliminated through usability engineering. If there were 250 users, this would result in a savings of 12.5 person weeks per year.
	TIME IS MONEY.
	Usability Engineering is a good investment.
	Download our free cost-justification tool Read Making a Business Case for Usability