Business Value of Us Ability

8/14/2019 Business Value of Us Ability

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Business Value ofUser-Centered Design andUsability

Jeff Johnson

UI Wizards, Inc.

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Reasons to Invest in Usability

! Market Demand

! Cut Customer-Support Costs

! Reduce Time to Profitability

! Shorten Time to Market

! Risk Management

! Avoiding GUI Design Bloopers


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Market Demand

! Faster, easier installation & setup! Easy to learn, use

! High responsiveness

! Tight product integration

! Greater productivity, usefulness

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Market Demand (cont.)

! Flexibility to accommodate laterfunctionality

! Company brand, style identity

! Better visual appeal

! Support users who have disabilities

! Bottom line: Retail quality design


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Cut Customer-Support Costs

! E.g., CompanyX gets ~180,000ARs/month

! x 12 months/year

! x $200/AR

! x 45% related to UI and userrequirements

! Potential savings: $194 M/year

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Reduce Time to Profitability

Time to market

$$$Expenses

Revenue

Time to profitability

Time


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Reduce Time to Profitability

Time to market may lengthen

Time to profitability shortens

$$$

Moral:Improving

usabilitybeforerelease canshorten timeto profitability

Expenses

Revenue

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User Centered Design CanShortenTime to Market!

! Gives programmers a clear target" When you know where youre going, you get there

faster! Simplifies implementation

" Coherent, factorable design! many commonalities

" Just the functionality users need

! Lowers cost of revision" Putting more design iteration in revisions of object

model, sketches, low-fidelity prototypes, where itcosts less than changing product code or architecture


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Risk Management

! Introducing a new product or productversion carries risk: Will it succeed?

" However success is defined

! Management wants to minimize risk

" Risk is about predicting the future

! User-centered design & usability testingare risk-reduction investments

" Like buying insurance

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Risk Analysis GuidesInvestment Decision

! Users internal or external?

! Users homogeneous or diverse?

! Use optional or required?

! Impact on operations low or high?

! Informational or transactional?

! Competition: little or much?

! Competitive advantage low or high?

! Strategic importance low or high?


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! Case 1: Aircraft maintenance shop" Online manuals to supplement paper ones

# Users: internal, homogeneous

# Use optional; low impact on operations

# Informational, not transactional

# Competition N/A; no competitive advantage

# Strategically unimportant

" Risk exposure is low

# => Investment in usability can be low

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! Case 2: Photography equipment store

" Moving bulk of business onto Web

# Users: external, diverse

# Use optional; high impact on operations

# Transactional + informational

# Much competition; high competitive advantage

# Strategically important

" Risk exposure is high

# => Investment in usability should be high


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Prime Source of GUI Bloopers:Anarchic Development

! No design

" We dont do design specs

" But dont really follow Agile recd practices either

! No UI standards or guidelines

" Publishers & media developers follow style-guides

" Many software developers dont realize they are inthat business ==> amateurish products

! No oversight" Lack of management or architectural control

" Result: no coherent model, many UI inconsistencies

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Avoiding Anarchic Development

! Dont hack. Design, develop, test, iterate.

! UCD and Agile are compatible. Both value:

"Understanding customer/user requirements

" Enlisting task-domain experts (aka users)

" Devising conceptual model (object model in Agile)

" Analyzing task ==> use-cases

" Frequent testing & iterative design

! Fanatics in both camps need to adapt

" Agile proponents: up-front design is needed

" UCD proponents: the UIs details will evolve


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Avoiding Anarchic Development

! UCD + Agile/XP

UI designfor cycle 2

Codeinternalobjects

UI designfor cycle N

Code UIfor

cycle 2

Code UIfor

cycle N

Cycle 2

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Summary:Reasons to Invest in Usability

! Market Demand

! Cut Customer-Support Costs

! Reduce Time to Profitability

! Shorten Time to Market

! Risk Management

! Avoiding GUI Design Bloopers


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References

!Time to Profitability" Conklin, P. Bringing Usability Effectively into Product

Development, in Rudisill et al(eds), Human-Computer Interface Design, 1996

" House, C. & Price, R. The Return Map, HarvardBusiness Review, Jan-Feb, 1991

! Risk Management" Altom, T. Usability as Risk Management,

Interactions, Mar-Apr 2007! GUI Bloopers

" Johnson, J., GUI Bloopers 2.0, Morgan Kaufman,2007

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Business Value of Us Ability