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USABILITY QUOTES
The following series of quotes is taken from a variety of sources, including academic papers, research reports, and journals and other publications. They relate to software and website usability issues and are arranged under group headings.
Why You Need Usability Expertise
Improve Product Sales
Cost Justifying Usability
Save Support and Maintenance Costs
Reduce Development Costs and Time
Increase Productivity
Increase Project and Product Success
References
Why You Need Usability Expertise
- There was an awareness of usability before the Web, but business executives and engineers
thought anyone could do it. The Web made people realise that usability was desirable but not easy
(Gilmore, IDEO, 2001).
- In new economy products for the Web, the user experience is the brand (Rubin, 2002).
- E-commerce shifts the emphasis from the advantages of being usable
to the penalties of not being usable (Hughes, 2002).
- Clients should insist on usability testing of all Web designs: The quality of the proposed usability
process is one of the few ways a client can judge the quality of the end result while still in the
proposal stage. A proposal without usability engineering milestones (or with poorly defined or
misguided methodology) will result in a poor site most of the time (unless you are in the lucky
10%)(Manning, McCarthy, Souza, 1998).
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Improve Product Sales
- In one survey, 28% of Web shoppers had trouble finding the product they wanted and 62% of Web
shoppers gave up looking for a product on-line (Seminerio, 1998).
- E-commerce sites lose almost half of their potential sales because users cannot use the site. In
other words, with better usability, the average site could increase its current sales by 79% (Nielsen,
2001).
- 44% of websites users do not succeed in finishing their purchase on e-business websites
(Nielsen, 2001).
- Websites must be easy to use. Hard-to-use sites frustrate customers, forfeit revenue to on-line
retailers, and erode the image of the company's brand (Manning, McCarthy, & Souza, 1998).
- At Digital, 20 of the most serious usability problems were fixed in the second release of a product.
The revenues grew by 80%, which was 66% greater than the projected growth. The customers
repeatedly pointed to usability as one of the most significant changes in the product (Wixon and
Jones, 1991).
- Interface design features can produce variations of up to 88% in site traffic and 76% in sales (Lohse
and Spiller,1998).
- Product list navigation features that reduce purchasing time account for 61% of a variance in sales
(Lohse and Spiller, 1998).
- 40% of the users do not return to a site when their first visit resulted in a negative experience
(Forrester, 1998)
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Cost Justifying Usability
- Systems design with usability engineering has typically reduced the time needed for training by
around 25% (Landauer, 1995).
- 80% of all software development costs occur after the product has been released. (Karat 1993).
- User-centred design typically cuts errors in user-system interaction from 5 percent down to 1
percent (Landauer, 1995).
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Save Support and Maintenance Costs
- 80% of maintenance is due to unmet or unforeseen user requirements; only 20% is due to bugs or
reliability problems (Pressman 1992).
- Microsoft tracks its support call costs and has seen a significant cost savings resulting from
improving the usability of its products, such as Word (Reed, 1992).
- Design changes due to usability work on one project at IDS/American Express resulted in estimated
savings of $45 million (Chalupnik and Rinehart 1992).
- In order to meet its customer support call needs, WordPerfect had to employ over 900 customer
response specialists (Reed, 1992).
- Design changes from one usability study at Ford Motor Company reduced the number of calls to the
help line from an average of 3 calls to none, saving the company an estimated $100,000 (Kitsuse,
1991).
- 80% of software life cycle costs occur during the maintenance phase (Pressman, 1992).
- The cost of change is 1 unit in the definition phase, 1.5-6 units during the development phase, and
60-100 units after release (Pressman, 1992).
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Reduce Development Costs and Time
- Usability engineering has demonstrated reductions in the product-development cycle by over 33-50% (Bosert, 1991).
- 63% of all software projects overran their estimates, with the top 4 reasons all related to usability
(Lederer and Prasad, 1992).
- The percentage of software code that is devoted to the interface has been rising over the years, with
an average of 47-60% of the code devoted to the interface (MacIntyre et al, 1990).
- Ricoh found that 95% of the respondents to a survey never used three key features deliberately
added to the product to make it more appealing. Customers either didn't know these features existed,
didn't know how to use them, or didn't understand them (Nussbaum and Neff, 1991).
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Increase Productivity
- The average software program has 40 design flaws that impair employees' ability to use it. The cost
in lost productivity is up to 720% (Landauer, 1995).
- Design changes due to usability work at IBM resulted in an average reduction of 9.6 minutes per
task, with a projected internal savings at IBM of $6.8 Million in 1991 alone (Karat, 1990).
- Every computer user suffers a constant series of small frustrations that ...add up to
trillions of dollars in lost productivity (Kreitzberg, 2002).
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Increase Project and Product Success
- More than 30% of software development projects are cancelled before completion, primarily
because of inadequate user design input. The result is a loss of approximately $80 billion annually to
the economy (Standish Group, 1995).
- The top two reasons projects fail is lack of user involvement and lack of requirements (Standish
Group, 1995).
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References
- Bosert, J.L. (1991). Quality Functional Deployment: A Practitioner's Approach. ASQC Quality Press,
New York.
- Chalupnik and Rinehart (1992), cited at http://wwwwseast.usec.sun.com:80/usability/benefits.html
- Forrester "Interactive Technology Strategies: Why Most Websites Fail", Forrester Report, 3(7),
September 1998.
- Gilmore, D. (2001). cited at: http://www.e-insite.net/eb-mag/index.asp.
- Hughes, M. (2002) E-commerce Smash-Mouth, User Experience, UPA Jan 2002 (1)1, 16-18.
- Karat, C. (1990). Cost-benefit analysis of usability engineering techniques. Proceedings of the
Human Factors Society. Orlando. Fl.
- Karat, C. (1993). The cost-benefit and business case analysis of usability engineering. InterChi
'93,Amsterdam, Tutorial Notes 23.
- Kitsuse, A. (1991). Why aren't computers... Across the Board (October) 28, 44-48.
- Kreitzberg, C. (2002). The CyberSmart Manager, User Experience, UPA Jan 2002 (1)1, 26-37.
- Landauer, T. (1995). The Trouble with Computers. MIT Press, 1995.
Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, pp 227.
- Lederer, A.L. and Prasad, J. (1992). Nine management guidelines for better cost
estimating. Communications of the ACM 35(2) (February), 51-59.
- Lohse, G.L., Spiller, P.(1998). Quantifying the Effect of User Interface Design Features on
Cyberstore Traffic and Sales. CHI 1998: 211-218
- MacIntyre, F. Estep, K.W., and Sieburth, J.M. (1990). Cost of user-friendly programming. Journal of
Forth Application and Research 6(2), 103-115.
- Manning, H., McCarthy, J. C., & Souza, R. K. (1998) "Interactive Technology Strategies: Why Most
Websites Fail", Forrester Report, 3(7), September 1998.
- Nielsen, J. (2001). Did Poor Usability Kill E-Commerce? Alertbox 19th August http://www.useit.com/
alertbox/20010819.html
- Nussbaum, B. and Neff, R. (1991). "I can't work this thing!" Business Week, April 29,1991: 58 - 66.
- Pressman, R.S. (1992). Software Engineering: A Practitioner's Approach. McGraw-Hill,
New York.
- Reed, S. (1992). Who defines usability? You do! PC Computing (Dec), 220-232.
- Rubin.(2002). What Business Are You In? User Experience, UPA Jan 2002 (1)1, 4-11.
- Seminerio, M. (1998). "Study: One In Three Experienced Surfers Find Online Shopping Difficult".
Inter@ctive Week, 10 September 1998.
- Standish Group, reported in Forbes, 1995.
- Wixon, D. and Jones, S. (1991). Usability for fun and profit: A case study of the re-design of the VAX
RALLY. Proceedings Workshop on Human-Computer Interface Design: Success Cases, Emerging
Methods and Real-World Context. University of Colorado, 23-26 July.
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