Usability cost benefits

Sunday 4 September 2011 - Filed under Usability News

Many organizations are aware of usability as one of the main product quality attributes. Put simply a combination of efficiency, effectiveness and satisfaction within a specific context of use. The potential benefits available through good usability are many but mainly revolve around increased customer satisfaction and productivity. It’s no secret though that even as more organizations become more “user centric”, few are yet to integrate usability testing into their product development process.

Since usability testing was developed over 20 years ago its been a challenge incorporating Testing user analysis into the product development life cycle. It’s strange though as you don’t need to be a usability expert to see the potential benefits of good usability for businesses of any size. So why is there this lack of use?

One potential reason is that though the possible benefits are mostly easy to recognize, they are not easy to quantify or calculate. This concern may have caused usability engineering to fall down the budget priorities list as it competes against other cost-benefit data like traditional market research. Often management will just go with what they know.

So what are the cost benefits?

Well there have been various studies carried out addressing the cost benefits of usability. Most agree that the human factor is crucial where a development organization can get a competitive advantage through improving usability as it ultimately leads to increased product sales. On the other hand a customer orientated organization can reap rewards through end user productivity, meaning better usability will reduce task times and potentially reduce staff turnover.

Some studies have analyzed the cost benefits of better usability from the view point of corporate clients, vendor companies and end users agreeing that poor usability results in an increase in support costs especially when the client has a large number of users. By concentrating on better usability and employing usability techniques a vendor company can slash development costs and time. Looking at corporate customers benefits will come in the form of more usable products that will reduce time and costs for end user training. At the end of the product life cycle there are the end users. The benefits here include reduced learning time, higher productivity and user satisfaction with the product.

Other studies have focused on the cost benefits by analyzing what is of most interest to the user. Vendors can benefit from a decrease in the need for customer support and the potential to make fewer design changes during product development. Whereas a developmental organization can benefit from an increase in user productivity, fewer user errors, less chance of future re-design and decreased user reliance on support functions.

2011-09-04  »  Sam