Usability Return on Investment

Summary

• Cost of usability activities
• Expected improvements in measured usability

Data collected from a large number of development projects: 42 case studies for the benefits estimate and 863 projects for the cost estimate.

Describes the different ways one converts usage metrics into monetary gains for different types of projects (intranets, e-commerce, marketing sites, internally-developed software, software for sale, consumer electronics and other hardware products).

> sample pages as thumbnail image

Table of Contents

110 page report.

1. Executive Summary
   • Cost of Usability
   • Benefits from Usability
   • Estimating ROI
2. Cost of Usability
   • Survey of Best Practices
   • Detailed Regression Model for Usability Budgets
   • Comparison with Other Budget Estimates
   • Future Trends
3. Benefits of Usability
   • Sources of Gains from Usability
   • Estimating the Magnitude of Gains from Usable Design
   • Computing Improvement Scores
   • Expected Usability Improvements
   • Comparison with Usability Metrics from Traditional Development Projects
   • Various Classes of Web Usability Metrics
4. Case Studies by Metrics
   • How Case Studies Were Collected
   • Anonymous Case Studies
   • Sales and Conversion Rates
     • 15 case studies
   • Traffic and Visitor Numbers
     • 8 case studies
   • Feature Use
     • 8 case studies
   • User Performance
     • 10 case studies
   • Development Time
     • 1 case study

What You Get

• 42 case studies of design improvements in redesigning websites: the measured improvements ranged from 0% to 6,567%. (Yes, one site didn't get better; one site got more than 65 times better.)
• 75 screenshots of before/after versions of websites with the associated metrics showing the impact of each design change on usage.
• Mathematical formula that takes the size of a design project and computes the recommended usability effort according to current best practices.

Who Should Read This Report?

• Anybody who is responsible for the design, implementation, or strategy for websites.
• Internet marketing managers.
• Usability managers and user experience professionals.
• Professors and consultants who teach usability (the site license does not allow you to make copies for course participants who are not employees of your company; even so, the material in the report will help anybody improve the way they teach usability).

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