Usability and a return on investment

Sunday 11 September 2011 - Filed under Usability News

Last year I conducted a survey from past User Testing clients. We found that after receiving the feedback and data from the Testing user survey over 97% had initiated a complete web redesign. We contacted the clients again the next business quarter to assess the impact that the redesign had, the average improvement across individual companies Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) was 85%.

A further survey was carried out last month to compare this improvement with that of the new Testing User survey. As I write this we have about 70% of the results in showing an average KPI improvement of 124 percent. The survey also reported that approximately 25% of the individual KPI’s had seen “massive improvements” in usability.

The KPI’s varied from company to company but Conversion rates,  user performance, traffic volumes, and target feature usage were all universal to those surveyed.

These statistics are better than expected for us. We conclude that in a world where usability testing budgets are not considerably increasing, the quality of the Testing User survey and the demand from business for good quality budget testing has led to a significant improvement in both our sales and user feedback.

Indeed from our research we estimate that approximately 10% – 15% of project usability budgets are devoted to user testing. With e-commerce sites experiencing more competition than ever before and also web design getting more and more complicated, it is very satisfying to see these positive results.
The impact usability has had is evident though, at the height of the dot com bubble most e-commerce sites saw conversion rates of around 1 percent. Now in large part thanks to usability testing we see an average of 2%.
So effectively conversions doubled in the last 5 – 6 years. It seems only logical that we ask ourselves can the testing user approach double conversions again in the next few years?

Well of course we would say yes but it’s not far fetched to suggest that a well designed usable web site can see conversions of up to 10% in the future. After all many websites already achieve this and better as a result of good usability.

This is just a blog though and I’m defiantly not promising 10% conversion rates to anyone who purchases a testing user product. I would like to also say that it’s unlikely that any website will see a conversion rate of 10% + because the web is now in the age of comparison and it’s no effort for users to shop around comparing prices and products. Its has also become the reference point for e-shoppers where many users often have no intention of buying. That said though by improving usability websites have never been more ready for user testing.

I mean the above aren’t the only variable to look at when addressing site conversion rates. A simple approach would suggest that if you wanted to increase web business by say double you could just throw all your resources at ad words or some similar pay for click or affiliate method. This though is very expensive and would need you to increase your advertising or marketing budget by double.

This method would probably work as well because say if you devote the 10% – 15% previously mentioned of resources on usability then you could probably obtain okay results by alternatively spending the money on traffic and optimization. However as time goes on these results become more difficult to maintain and capitalize on. With the all the competition you would eventually need to spend on usability to maintain your competitive edge, but as your site becomes more complicated the usability improvements will become more complicated to make. This results in you shopping around for one of the insanely expensive usability consultancies that will gladly make up a 5, sometimes 6 figure price for you.

The answer is to maintain customer loyalty from the start with a good usability framework for you to work off in the future.

Back to the title subject of usability ROI, it has long been the case that Return on usability investment just relates to the size of your usability budget. Not so our research suggests. As company budgets in general decline products like the Testing User survey fill the gap not as inferior products but as better suited, better value purchases.

2011-09-11  »  Sam