The Return On Investment (ROI) of User Experience

User Experience Design (UXD) is the science and art of designing a product like a website or software application so that its:

• Easy to use
• Fits expectations of the user
• Meets business goals

There's a whole methodology around designing the user experience.  So is it worth it to do all that work to design a user experience?  Lets answer the question by delving into the return on investment (ROI) of User Experience and of doing user experience work.

Gartner is is the world's leading information technology research and advisory company that puts out reports for developers and engineers.

They estimate that this year, worldwide IT spending reached $3.7 trillion.  Gartner also project that by 2017, worldwide IT spending will reach $4.3 trillion.

A similar organisation, IEEE, put out an article called 'Why software development projects fail.' and shared some key stats such as:

1. The percent of products that are aboandoned because they are hopelessly inadequate is up to 15% of all projects
2. The percent of revenue that goes to the IT group is 5% of a companys total revenue.(up to 10 % if its a telecomms/financial company).
3. The amount of time that developers spend on rework that is actually avoidable is 50% of their time.
4. The cost of fixing an error after project go-live is 100 times that of fixing an error before the project is completed.

Of the top 12 reasons why projects fail - 3 of them are directly related to user experience and those are:

1. Badly defined requirements
2. Poor communications among customers developers and users
3. Stakeholder politics

The kind of work that User Experience Designers (UXD's) do is stakeholder interviews, user research, user testing, and user centered design. These are things that can fix at least 3 of those 12 reasons as to why software development projects fail.

You can actually calculate the savings or revenue or additional benefit that you get from improving your user experience in a product.

First example - lets say that you owned a small private jet airline and you offer flights all around the world.

So you have a website where people can buy flights through your booking engine, but the searching and paying part of the website is confusing and hard to use and you have estimated that 300 customers are actually abandoning before paying because of a poor user experience, so lets do some calculations.

Each customer pays an average of $5000 over the course of a year.  So you are losing $4109 a day or $1,500,000 a year.

If you spend $50,000 to fix the user experience issues and another $50,000 to rewrite the code based on those user experience improvements, we can estimate that you are going to spend $100,000 improving the user experience.  It will take you roughly 24 days to realise the investment.

There are many measurements that would be useful such as:

1. Conversion rate - ie the number or percent increase of visiters to the website who make a purchase
2. Or we might be interested in percentage drop off
3. Whether fewer complaints being logged
5. Fewer calls to your guest contact centre
6. Higher usage / # of return visits
7. Save users time (measure the length of time to perform an end to end booking 1 year ago versus length of time to do an end to end booking now)
8. Number of errors reduced.
9. Perhaps we want to increase the amount


Here's a quote from Albert Einstein I will leave my readers with: "Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius -- and a lot of courage -- to move in the opposite direction."

-Deb.

Planning your Usability tasks

Usability is like world peace - we all want it, but how do we get there?  There are plenty of sites out there with advice on how to do card sorting, persona creation, wire frames, & even how to test, but if you don't set out a road map for your work and clearly explain this to either the Approver for the project budget or the Project Manager - your work will blow out with regard to time and cost. People wont also understand what you are doing, or the purpose.  So - set yourself up a road map.  Allocate time estimates as to how long it might take you to complete this tasks, and then hold a short intro session as to what you're doing and why. This might be in the form of a Powerpoint.  Here is a road map below which you might like to use.

Innovative or just 'plane' Creepy? Planely's travel matching service

Another Boring Business Trip?  Never again.  Be matched with your ideal travel companion to party it up at conferences with you or help keep your fitness up by stalking you on your next work-related destination...

Some of my readers may already be using travel itinerary organiser Tripit to brag broadcast trips to friends via LinkedIn or Facebook.  However social travel is evolving.  Hopefully privacy controls are too.

Planely users submit their Facebook or LinkedIn profiles to the service, which then uses an algorithm to produce suggestions for compatible travelers on the same route.

Users of the service can then choose to make contact via email with potential matches on their flight, or in transit at the same airport.

Satisfly are another site but uses a different model, allowing travelers on participating airlines to indicate their ideal preference for a seat partner on a flight.

KLM Airlines gives passengers the option of sharing their Facebook or Linkedin profile with fellow passengers.  Travelers can choose to sit next to anyone who looks like an interesting neighbor, by selecting the spot next to them on a seating map. If then passengers choose to backout of social traveling, there's always the option to remove details from the service and change to another available seat.

I wonder whether Australian airlines Qantas, Jetstar, and Virgin will consider going down the same social route?  Will it be a hit or miss?  Id love to get some real feedback (not from a PR person).

Nielsen Norman Conference in Sydney

I'm currently at the Nielsen Norman UX Conference in Sydney for a 3 day workshop on designing complex applications and websites. Hands down this has been the most useful & practical UX conference yet.

I've found other UX conferences a little bit too 'fluffy' and impractical. Or too short between speakers to get any real depth.

I even got a photo with Jakob Nielsen himself!

My first mobile blog post!

So I thought I'd try my very first attempt to upload text & photo from my iPhone email to my blog!
Below is a photo I took of the view of Adelaide Street at night showing points of interest through the Layar Augmented Reality browser app. Very cool, this app has loads of potential.

How Yates got it right

Id like to direct you to the latest and greatest campaign: Growing veggies.  Yes, Veggies.  Yates have done very well in sparking a competitive spirit nationwide.  Theyve integrated a competition into their website for the chance to win $4000.  What really is spurring me on to enter?  The fact that OTHERS are in the race too. If you scroll down to the lower half of the website, it shows live feeds on which state of Australia is leading. This type of approach creates a buzz! It makes the site feel alive and current.  Like the competition must be entered into.  How I came across this site was though a facebook ad asking me to enter a competition. Clever participatory marketing without doing the obvious Sell! Sell! Sell!

Hello!

Thanks and welcome to my blog.  This is my first post so no doubt you'll hear a lot more from me.