Tips for Usability Professionals in a Down Economy
Journal of Usability Studies, Volume 4, Issue 2, February 2009, pp. 60-69
Article Contents
Tip #5: Demonstrate Business Value
Tight economic times make it even more critical to demonstrate the business value of your usability work. At least two steps need to be taken to do this: (a) measure and (b) convert the measurements to something that senior managers care about. The following are some tips for each of those steps:
- Measure. Some usability people seem to be allergic to statistics. They think they're going to break out in a rash if they calculate a 90% confidence interval. One of the reasons my colleague, Bill Albert, and I wrote Measuring the User Experience was to show usability people that statistics aren't something to be afraid of. You can't demonstrate true business value without using some kind of measurement. It can be as simple as calculating a task completion rate (with a confidence interval). Take the example I mentioned earlier of an online study comparing two slightly different designs for an account-opening wizard. We were able to demonstrate that one design resulted in a statistically higher rate of task completion (opening an account) than the other—2.5% higher, to be exact (± 1.2%). That's an example of a usability measurement that senior management will pay attention to.
- Convert to business value. Many people assume that business value is always expressed in monetary terms, but that isn't always the case. Find out what metrics matter to the project you're involved in or to the senior management of the company. Many senior managers have "scorecards" or other sets of measurable objectives against which their performance is assessed (potentially impacting their compensation). Find out what some of those criteria are and see if you can relate your measures to them. For example, many senior managers have a customer satisfaction goal, as measured by a specific survey of randomly selected customers. Try to relate self-reported measures from your usability studies to these customer satisfaction ratings. Similarly, many managers have a prospect-to-customer conversion rate goal for their Website. Usability metrics like the task completion rate mentioned earlier for online account opening are relatively easy to relate to these goals (e.g., "With this design, we estimate that 2.5% more prospects who start the account-opening process will complete it").
The bottom line is that you need to speak in terms that matter to the business sponsors or senior managers involved with a project. For more information about calculating the business value of usability work, see Bias and Mayhew (2005).