TandemSEVEN

Need to convince management that your usability design and evaluation work has a great return on investment?

Consider sharing these helpful statistics.

• Estimated savings when software problem found and fixed in early design phase rather than after delivery: 100 times (Boehm, 1987)
• Estimated amount of software code saved by prototyping compared to not prototyping: 40% (Boehm et al., 1984) 
• Rank of user involvement as predictor of successful projects: 1 (The Standish Group, 1994) 
• Estimated increase in conversion rate after improving customer experience: 40% (Creative Good, 2000) 
• Estimated increase in order size after improving customer experience: 10% (Creative Good, 2000)

After improving ease of use: 

• IBM.com sales increased 400% (Tedeschi, 1999) 
• Liz Claiborne’s Elisabeth.com tripled rate at which lookers became buyers (Tedeschi, 2002) 
• Dell.com online purchases increased from $1 million per day in September, 1998, to $34 million per day in March, 2000 (Black, 2002) 
• Digital Equipment Corporation found 80% increase in revenue (Wixon & Jones, 1992)

Ease of use is not just good for users. It is good for business. 


References

• Black, J. (2002, December 4). Usability is next to profitability. BusinessWeek Online [On-line]. 
• Boehm, B. (1987). Industrial software metrics top 10 list. IEEE Software, 4(5), 84-85.
• Boehm, B. W., Gray, T. E., & Seewaldt, T. (1984). Prototyping vs. specifying: A multi-project experiment. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 10(3), 290-333.
• Creative Good (2000, June 12). The dotcom survival guide. Creative Good [On-line].
• The Standish Group (1994). The CHAOS report. [On-line].
• Tedeschi, B. (1999, August 30). Good Web site design can lead to healthy sales. New York Times e-commerce report. [On-line].
• Tedeschi, B. (2002, November 18). E-Commerce Report; E-tailers are putting multimedia tinsel back on their shopping sites this holiday season. New York Times e-commerce report [On-line].
• Wixon, D., & Jones, S. (1992). Usability for fun and profit: A case study of the design of DEC RALLY version 2. Internal report, Digital Equipment Corporation. Cited in Karat, C., A business case approach to usability cost justification. In Bias, R. G., & Mayhew, D. J. (1994). Cost-justifying usability. San Diego: Academic Press.