The Benefits of Usability
There are two reasons why you should consider usability on your next development project: reduced costs and increased sales.
- Increased user productivity
- Decreased user errors
- Decreased training costs
- Reduced development costs
- Decreased user support costs
- Increased job satisfaction
Reduced costs
- Increased sales volumes and profits from improved user conversion rates
- Increased customer satisfaction
- Improved perception of the organisation
- Increased market share
- Product/service differentiation
- Valuable competitive advantage
Increased sales
At the Usability Professionals Association website there are extensive examples and statistics outlining the business case for usability. Here are a few examples:
"The average UI 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)
"One [well-known] study found that 80 percent of software life-cycle costs occur during the maintenance phase. Most maintenance costs are associated with "unmet or unforeseen" user requirements and other usability problems." (Pressman, 1992)
"Wixon & Jones did a case study of a usability-engineered software product that increased revenue by more than 80% over the first release of the product (built without usability work) (Wixon). The revenues of the usability-enhanced system were 60% higher than projected. Many customers cited usability as a key factor in buying the new system." (Bias & Mayhew, 1994)
"Incorporating ease of use into your products actually saves money. Reports have shown it is far more economical to consider user needs in the early stages of design, than it is to solve them later. For example, in Software Engineering: A Practitioner's Approach, author Robert Pressman shows that for every dollar spent to resolve a problem during product design, $10 would be spent on the same problem during development, and multiply to $100 or more if the problem had to be solved after the product's release." (IBM, 2001)
"At one company, end-user training for a usability-engineered internal system was one hour compared to a full week of training for a similar system that had no usability work. Usability engineering allowed another company to eliminate training and save $140,000. As a result of usability improvements at AT&T, the company saved $2,500,000 in training expenses." (Bias & Mayhew, 1994)
Last updated: Friday, October 03, 2008
