I have a small collection of links to articles and videos on this topic that I wanted to share with you. Billy Hollis wrote a very good article on this topic called, Is UX Investment Worth It? In this article, Hollis provides a helpful calculation to figure productivity savings. In this video, Susan Weinschenk of Human Factors International talks about the ROI of UX
If you are looking for some powerful anecdotes about how ignoring customers and end-users went woefully and expensively wrong, have a look at this post by one of my favorite customer experience gurus, Mark Hurst: How to avoid a billion dollar loss – with better customer experience. I’d like to start a collection of great resources on this topic here. So if you have any links to additional material that you think is really powerful, please add to the collection here! Thanks!
Hi Esther,
a definite go-to source is the ROI calculators page by Human Factors International. They cover various aspects of ROI like training and help desk cost as well as bare productivity. The productivity figures are quite impressive whenever the number of users is high; however I still think they under-estimate the actual ROI. Most ROI calculators use average time for their predictions, which is pretty optimistic. While more than 50% users complete their tasks faster than average (here’s why), the slower quarter can take dramatically longer, in particular in bad-usability applications. The users are not at all to blame here, it’s simply a statistical phenomenon (for statisticians: the exponential distribution’s long tail). Nevertheless, when you add up overall process times, those long-runners can become a serious problem whenever you have dependencies in the business processes. Calculating this quantitatively is pretty difficult – from a practitioner’s point of view, it’s a good start to use your standard calculators and expect more…
😉 Bernard
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