What are the benefits of a usable system?

Usable systems can save money by helping to:

• increase productivity
• increase customer satisfaction
• increase sales and revenues
• reduce development time and costs
• reduce maintenance costs
• decrease training and support costs

top of page

Is there data to support these claims?

Yes, there is data to support these claims:

• Reduce development time and costs: 63 percent of all software projects overrun their budgetary estimates, with the top four reasons all related to unforeseen usability problems.
• Reduce maintenance costs: 80 percent of maintenance is due to unmet or unforeseen user requirements, and only 20 percent is due to bugs or reliability problems.
• Decrease training and support costs: A telecommunications company took a user-centered approach to their new point-of-sale system and saved about $750,000 in training and internal support costs.

To learn more about how usability can save you time and money, see can usability be measured?

top of page

How can I show that usability engineering saves money?

You can use usability testing to show that the benefits of usability engineering outweigh the costs.

This method was first published by Clare-Marie Karat of IBM who used it to show a 100-fold return on investment for a particular software product. In that case, spending $60,000 on usability engineering throughout development resulted in savings of $6,000,000 in the first year alone.

The results from this technique are especially convincing if the same organization pays both the development costs of the Web site and the salaries of the people who use the site. But it should also be convincing to organizations that really care about how problems on their site cost their external users time, money, and frustration.

The types of problems that you might find costing time (and therefore money) are misleading navigational cues, poorly designed pathways, pages that are so dense they take a long time to use, etc.

Here is how you can use usability testing to show how benefits outweigh costs:

1. Do a usability test on an early version of the Web site (or other product). This could be the old site or one done without involvement of usability specialists.
• Use actual users doing relevant tasks.
• Measure time to complete tasks.
2. Identify and fix problems. (Improve the entire site, not just the test tasks, even though you will be using the test tasks to show the benefits.)
3. Do a usability test on the new version of the site.
• Have users who match the demographics of the first set of users do the same tasks you used in the first test.
• Measure time to complete the same tasks.
4. Calculate the improvement in average time to complete each task. You can do the next steps for each task separately, for just one major task, or for all the tasks together.
5. Multiply the time saved by the number of people who are likely to do that task in a given time period (say, each day).
• If users are likely to do a task several times a day, you can also multiply by that number.
• If you have noted the time saved in seconds or minutes, convert it to hours because you will want to work in hours in the next step.
6. Identify the average hourly salary of the users who do that task.
7. Convert time to dollars by multiplying time saved (in hours) by users' salary (per hour).
8. Find the one-year savings by multiplying your previous figure by the number of days in the year that users are likely to do the task.
• If this is a work task, use the number of days in the organization's working year.
• You now have the total annual savings of your usability changes - all due to time saved by fixing the product so users can do tasks more quickly.
9. Compare the amount saved to the cost of usability activities

What is the return on investment (ROI)?

Simply put, it's a way to determine if usability is worth the investment, by comparing the money spent on usability activities with the savings that result from the process.

Since budgetary constraints often result in software and Web site development managers viewing usability costs as an added effort and expense, the key is to help your organization realize that usability is an investment, not an added expense.

Usability increases customer satisfaction, productivity, and leads to customer trust and loyalty. Consumers have become more demanding about usability. Applying usability in the initial design can greatly reduce extensive redesign, maintenance, and customer support.

Following is a list of ways that you can measure the ROI of usability in your organization:

	User Effectiveness increase success rate reduce user errors increase productivity improve ease of use increase ease of learning increase trust in systems improve user satisfaction increase job satisfaction decrease support costs reduce training costs
	Development Costs save development costs save development time reduce maintenance costs save redesign costs
	Revenue increase revenue increase transactions/purchases increase product sales increase traffic retain customers attract more customers increase market share

top of page