Cost-Justifying Usability: An Update for the Internet Age

by Randolph G. Bias, Deborah J. Mayhew

You just know that an improvement of the user interface will reap rewards, but how do you justify the expense and the labor and the time—guarantee a robust ROI!—ahead of time? How do you decide how much of an investment should be funded? And what is the best way to sell usability to others?

In this completely revised and new edition, Randolph G. Bias (University of Texas at Austin, with 25 years’ experience as a usability practitioner and manager) and Deborah J. Mayhew (internationally recognized usability consultant and author of two other seminal books including The Usability Engineering Lifecycle) tackle these and many other problems. It has been updated to cover cost-justifying usability for Web sites and intranets, for the complex applications we have today, and for a host of products—offering techniques, examples, and cases that are unavailable elsewhere. No matter what type of product you build, whether or not you are a cost-benefit expert or a born salesperson, this book has the tools that will enable you to cost-justify the appropriate usability investment.

·Includes contributions by a host of experts involved in this work, including Aaron Marcus, Janice Rohn, Chauncey Wilson, Nigel Bevan, Dennis Wixon, Clare-Marie Karat, Susan Dray, Charles Mauro, and many others;
·Includes actionable ideas for every phase of the software development process;
·Includes case studies from inside a variety of companies;
·Includes ideas from "the other side of the table," software executives who hold the purse strings, who offer thoughts on which proposals for usability support they've funded, and which ones they've declined.

Genres: Design, Usability

640 pages, Paperback

First published May 2, 1994

Reviews

[Tom Panning · Rating 3 out of 5]

My biases: I read this book because I was looking for ways to directly tie improving usability to the bottom line. When push comes to shove and there are more features than there is time to implement, everything in a project has to justify its use of resources, and the easiest way to do that is to point to the effect on sales. Also, my software is sold B2B, so our customers aren't our users, which makes it that much harder to trace the effects of usability on sales.

This book is composed of many individual papers/chapters with different authors, and has the usual pros and cons of that type of book: multiple viewpoints and experiences are represented, but there's a noticeable amount of overlap between the chapters. Also, this book covers a broad subject so some of the chapters didn't apply to me, but that was usually clear from the chapter title and introduction.

As far as fulfilling my goals, this book was only partially successful. It presented the ROI metrics that I was already familiar with (e.g., increased sales, lower support costs), and included a little extra insight into tying some of those more firmly to usability improvements. It also presented a couple metrics that I hadn't seen before, but nothing that made me say "aha!". Obviously, this isn't entirely the authors' fault; coming up with ROI dollar amounts for usability in vendor software (as opposed to internal software and websites) is difficult. Unfortunately, most of the examples that the book gave for vendor software were from the 1994 edition of this book; it would have been nice to see some more recent examples. Also, a few of the citations that I looked up were out of date.

All in all, I would only recommend reading this book if you really need to cost-justify usability; if you're already able to get resources for usability and are looking for something to read, there are more interesting books about other aspects of usability. If you really need to learn about cost-justifying usability, then this seems to be the best book... but mostly by default. Weighing in at 600 pages, this book reinforces my observation that a technical book's quality is inversely proportional to its length.

[Quintin Balsdon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent resource. Well worth the time and effort