Benefits

Benefits of doing Usability Engineering

There is no free lunch. But sometimes if you eat a good breakfast, you won’t need to spend as much money on lunch. Making programs more usable definitely takes a lot of extra time and effort. But this extra cost is usually found worthwhile because of the financial gains due to greater usability. There is a large body of literature on the business-case analysis of HCI methods: (Mantei and Teorey 1988; Nielsen 1993; Bias and Mayhew 1994; Mayhew 1996).

The value of usability
Usability directly impacts one of the most critical business drivers: Quality. When you deliver a highly usable system, you are delivering a higher quality product because usability is one of the fundamental software quality attributes.
Highly usable software creates delighted users and user organizations.
Higher quality and delighted customers together bring in numerous business benefits including competitive edge and improved bottom line.
Such business benefits can come from all types of software including custom-developed applications, mass-market products, web sites, e-com sites, even CBTs and interactive multimedia.
Competitive advantage is a common benefit for all the following types of organizations. Certain other benefits are unique to each type of organization and are described in the subsequent sections.

Software product companies: In the past, software product companies competed for sales primarily by increasing the number of features. More recently however, usability has become a critical element for product success and is no longer considered a “luxury” by companies that want to be competitive.

Custom software companies: Custom software companies too gain competitive advantage against those who deliver mediocre software that does not address usability aspects.

User organizations: Customers who perceive a user organization (airline, bank, etc) as fast and efficient in its transactions will most likely return to them for more.

Organizations that offer software as part of another service: Suppose two organizations sell, say, business information. Assuming that there is no perceived difference in the quality of the information, customers prefer the organization whose software makes it easy for them to retrieve and use the information.

The gains due to higher usability are typically seen from the following factors:
* increased user productivity
* increased sales
* increased user satisfaction
* decreased errors
* decreased training costs
* decreased employee turnover
* decreased workplace injuries and lost time
* decreased implementation costs (due to avoidance of late design changes)
* decreased maintenance and support costs

“Faire de la bonne cuisine demande un certain temps. Si on vous fait attendre, c’est pour mieux vous servir, et vous plaire.” (from the menu of Restaurant Antoine, New Orleans, as reproduced in (Brooks 1995)) It takes time to produce good, usable software just as it takes time to produce good food. The comparison with fast-food restaurants might imply that standardized software is more amenable to process and predictability — gourmet quality software demands a skilled chef who is given sufficient time. It’s usually worth the wait.
Commercial product development is often driven by the need to get the product on the market as soon as possible. The resulting time constraints seem to discourage use of usability engineering. Lewis and Rieman mention some recent ideas by Peter Conklin (published in (Rudisill, Lewis et al. 1995)):
“The idea is to replace emphasis on time to market by emphasis on time to break even. Many companies measure projects by how quickly they ship. A project that gets to market sooner is rated better than one that takes longer. Conklin points out that the point of getting to market is to make money, and so a more important target date is the time the product recovers its development costs and starts to earn a profit: time to break even. Anything that increases the rate of product acceptance, that is, the growth of sales volume, will shorten time to break even, and if the increase in acceptance is big enough, time to break even may be shorter even if time to market is longer. It’s smart to take time to produce a better product if the impact on acceptance is big enough.” (Lewis and Rieman 1994).

Take an example how a usability will add to cost benefitis for company.
Assume:
Application with : 20 Screens
Used : 5 times a day
By : 1000 Users
Who cost : GBP 20/Hr

Improve Usability and …
work on each screen take 2 seconds less

Saving will be:GBP 222,222 in a year!!