Usability Return on Investment (ROI)

The interface design and usability field has matured to a point where we can measure the cost-benefits and impact of conducting (or not conducting) usability and user-centered design.

View a number of industry articles on usability ROI on the Articles page.

If you have usability ROI experiences and case studies you'd like to share, please e-mail me.
 

Usability ROI Case Studies

Here are a few examples of specific cases where usability ROI has been measured. For more details on these case studies, visit UsabilityNet.org, a European Union project that provides usability and user-centered design resources for practitioners, managers and companies.

Creative Good - To hammer home its point, Creative Good offered the striking revelation that a dollar spent on advertising during the 1998 holiday season produced $5 in total revenue, while a dollar spent on customer experience improvements yielded more than $60.

IBM - On IBM's website, the most popular feature was the search function, because the site was difficult to navigate. The second most popular feature was the 'help' button, because the search technology was so ineffective. IBM's solution was a 10-week effort to redesign the site, which involved more than 100 employees at a cost estimated 'in the millions.' The result: In the first week after the redesign, use of the 'help' button decreased 84 per cent, while sales increased 400 per cent.

Cyber Dialogue - The absolute number of online bankers grew 100,000 to a total of 6.3 million in the past 12 months, but 3.1 million U.S. adults have discontinued their use of online banking according to Cybercitizen Finance from Cyber Dialogue. The study also found that only 35 per cent of online bankers that discontinued their service were inclined to try it again. "Although Cybercitizens begin banking online to save time, more than 50 per cent have discontinued use because they find the service too complicated or were dissatisfied with the level of customer service," said Michael Weiksner, Manager of Finance Strategies at Cyber Dialogue.

Forrester Research - Of 20 major sites audited, 51 per cent were compliant with simple web usability principles such as "is the site organized by user goals?" and "does a search list retrievals in order of relevance?" (in other words, the average site violated half of these simple design principles). Most sites will waste between $1.5M and $2.1M on redesigns next year (1999). Why? Designers are engaged in an endless cycle of overhauls that don't fix their problems. Their goals of achieving fast performance and consistent look and feel are directionally correct but miss out on at least 20 other more specific usability objectives. And since ease of use is not measured, flaws go undetected.