UEVision Presents: How Usability Can Help You Get More Customers

Usability Webinar Series

Why Product Usability Can Help You
Win More Customers –
Even in a Down Economy

© Copyright 2008 UEVision. All rights reserved. - CONFIDENTIAL

About Sarah Kling

Sarah is the CEO of UEVision, Inc.
With over 12 years of experience designing software systems and web applications,
Sarah is a leading authority on user-experience enhancement. Prior to founding
UEVision, Sarah served as user experience consultant, usability evangelist, and team
leader for a number of enterprise and business-to-business software companies,
p p ,
including Saba, E-Stamp, and Inxight Software.

Sarah specializes in designing the enterprise user experience by adapting user-
focused design practices to the specific requirements of enterprise software systems
and the needs of their users. She has led a variety of successful initiatives to integrate
usability "best practices" with the product development process to produce enterprise
products that are practical, efficient, visually appealing, and highly usable.

Sarah holds an AB from Stanford University and has studied usability and human factors at the
University of California and UC-Santa Cruz. She is a member of the Association for Computing
Machinery (ACM), the Usability Professionals Association (UPA), and the Bay Area special interest
group in user interface (BayCHI).


About UEVision
UEVision is the only user experience design company
with th b dth of expertise to deliver cutting-edge
ith the breadth f ti t d li tti d
business, enterprise, and consumer product user
experiences.
Based in San Francisco, UEVision designs and delivers
the perfect product user experience. UEVision's
custo e s a e typically experienced g e profitability
customers have typ ca y e pe e ced higher p o tab ty
on their product launches and the ROI on UI investment
typically is up 1000%.
For more information, please visit www UEVision com
information www.UEVision.com.


Our Experience
55 product launches
34 UI redesign projects

Specializing in UI design of web-based
applications and portals:
- IT Monitoring Systems
- IT Hardware and Software Configuration
- CRM Systems
- Business Analytics

Web-based application feature design:
Role based
Role-based dashboards and scorecards
Content management systems and repositories
Data analytics and visualization

Experience with multiple web technologies and
platforms (portlets, AJAX, JSP, JSF, etc.)
4

Agenda
Introduction
Overview
How Product Usability Can Help You Win More
y p
Customers….
Lower Support, Maintenance, and Development Cost
Increase Customer Satisfaction
Increase Profitability
Q&A

5

Introduction
Welcome to the first in a series of usability webinars
from UEVision.

This first webinar in a series from UEVision will
address why usability projects can be even more
critical during tougher economic conditions.

Learn how companies today can use their usability
p j
projects to lower their support costs, and keep existing
pp , p g
customers and attract new customers, and increase
profitability.

6

Overview: Why Companies Cut Usability
y p y
When the economy is in a downturn, companies are frequently
tempted to put product usability and user interface (UI) projects
p p p y ( )p j
on the budgetary chopping block as a means of belt-tightening.
Usability is too frequently viewed as a “nice to have” or a
checklist feature, rather than a core aspect of the product
development cycle th t can contribute to cost savings and
d l t l that t ib t t t i d
profitability.
This perception can stem from several sources, including a lack
of:
Metrics and methods for measuring the impact and influence of
usability on the product; and
An understanding of the real impact that usability has on costs
costs,
customer satisfaction, and profitability.


Overview: The Cost and ROI of Usability
Inadequate use of usability engineering methods in software
development projects have been estimated to cost the US
economy about $30 billion per year in lost productivity.2
Bad design on the Internet is estimated to cost a few billion dollars
more.1
But,
B t a number of studies h
b f t di have shown th t ROI on a UI investment is
h that i t ti
typically up 1000%. 3

This method was first published by an IBM usability researcher, who
showed that spending $60 000 on usability engineering throughout
$60,000
development resulted in savings of $6,000,000 in the first year alone.
A reduced number of product design iterations provides significant
cost savings to the organization. Once an application feature is
coded, it can cost up to 10 times as much as it does to correct a
UI problem during the design process.
The standard cost-benefit ratio for usability is $1:$10-$100, so for
every $1 spent on usability you can expect to save $10 to $100 later
usability,
in the product lifecycle.1
© Copyright 2008 UEVision. All rights reserved. - CONFIDENTIAL 8

Overview: Integrating Usability Into the Product Lifecycle
g g y y

Usability techniques integrated into the product
lifecycle can be used to:
Lower product support, maintenance, and development costs
Keep existing customers and attract new customers; and
Increase overall profitability.
Usability techniques and projects do not need to be
large-scale,
large-scale multi-million $$ investments that require
months of intensive work.
Targeting low-hanging fruit and making incremental
changes can net as many or more returns especially if such
returns,
changes are done in a thoughtful and ongoing manner.
Let’s learn more about these usability techniques.


Why Product Usability Can Help You Win More Customers:
Lower Support, Maintenance, and Development
Costs


Lowered Support, Maintenance, and
Development C t
D l t Costs
Products with excellent usability often see significantly lower
support,
support maintenance and development costs than other less
usable products, giving companies an immediate and substantial
cost savings.

Frustrated users who can’t complete their transactions or figure out
the next step call into customer service and support, driving costs up
unnecessarily.
Or worse, they return the product, drop off the website, or find
workarounds so the product becomes shelfware.
In this section, we ll share facts and tips on how to
we’ll
make your product more user-friendly so you can
avoid these mistakes.


Fun Usability Facts: Support Costs
y pp
A certain printer manufacturer released a major printer driver that many
users had difficulty installing – the driver had undergone no user testing
before its release. O er 50 000 users called s pport for assistance, at a
release Over 50,000 sers support assistance
cost to the company of nearly $500,000 a month.
To correct the situation, the manufacturer sent out letters of apology and patches
discs (at a cost of $3 each) to users; they ended up spending $900,000 on the
problem.
bl
According to the printer manufacturer: “The problem could have been identified
and corrected at a fraction of the cost if the product had been subjected to
even the simplest of usability testing”.9

At Microsoft several years ago, Word’s print merge feature was so
confusing that it generated numerous support calls that averaged 45 minutes
per calls.
calls
As a result of usability testing and other related usability techniques, the UI
for the feature was adjusted. In the next release, support calls 'dropped
dramatically'; Microsoft recognized 'significant cost savings’ as a result of this
feature design adjustment 6
adjustment.


Fun Usability Facts: Maintenance Costs
y

One study found that 80% of software life-cycle costs occur during the
maintenance phase. Most maintenance costs are associated with "unmet or
phase unmet
unforeseen" user requirements and other usability problems.4

Usability researchers Martin and McClure found that $20-30 billion was
y $
spent worldwide on software maintenance. Studying backlogs of
maintenance work shows that the "invisible” usability backlog is 167% the
size of the declared backlog.
Additional case study data also shows that internal development organizations
are spending the majority of their resources on maintenance activities and thus
cannot initiate development of strategic new systems.5

As a result of usability improvements at AT&T, the company saved
$2,500,000 in training and maintenance expenses.8


Fun Usability Facts: Development Costs
Savings from earlier vs. later changes: Changes cost less when
made earlier in the development life cycle. Twenty changes in a
project,
project at 32 hours per change and [a minimal] hourly rate of $35
$35,
would cost $22,400.
Reducing this to 8 hours per change would reduce the cost to $5,600.
Savings = $16,800.10
g

A financial services company had to scrap an application it had
developed, when, shortly before implementation, developers doing a
p , , y p , p g
user acceptance test found a fatal flaw in their assumptions about
how data would be entered.
By this time, it was too late to change the underlying structure, and the
li ti implemented.11
application never i l t d

At one well-known enterprise software company, usability techniques
h l d cut d l t time b 33 50% 13
helped t development ti by 33-50%.


A Real-World Vignette….
Real World
One of the largest cost savings can be realized by a significant
reduction in the support the product requires when it reaches the
market 16
market.
In 2004, McAfee® reported a 90% reduction in the expected support of their
product by implementing an innovative method of user interaction (i.e. a
dashboard-type management console).
When McAfee Inc. introduced its ProtectionPilot software—a "dashboard"-type
management console for two of its Active VirusScan suites.
In the first 10 weeks after release, more than 20,000 users went online to get a
copy.
Those 20,000 downloads of ProtectionPilot over a 10-week time span generated
only 170 calls to McAfee's support lines—approximately one-tenth the
volume that the company would expect, according to McAfee software
development manager David Ries.
And, roughly a third of those support calls were actually pre-sales questions,
Ries says, from people who wanted more information about what the product
could do; they didn't need technical help.
The company attributed this improvement to the enhanced product design and
the significant role that usability played in the need for user help requests.


Top Tips: Lower Costs
Tip 1: Redesign the feature or screen that generates the most
support calls.
Every product has a feature or even a single screen that is known to cause
usability problems. (If you don’t know what yours is, just ask the support team.)
Focus resources on redesigning that feature or screen. Gather user inputs on the
specific issues and solutions to those issues, create a low-fi designs, test them
with users, and implement the changes in the p
, p g product.
Tip 2: Update and enhance your user documentation and support
resources, including tutorials, Getting Started information, and
“What’s this?” help.
Most users would prefer to answer questions themselves than call support, so
make it easy for your users to quickly find the answers to questions themselves.
Enhancing “inline” help on screens within a product can have a strong positive
impact on p
p product usability. Frequently, p
y q y, products feature obscure or unexplained
p
“internal” terms, or simply lack sufficient explanations for how a screen or feature
works. Inline help provides the just-in-time answer to obvious user
questions.
Where to focus if you can’t do it all? Target those areas of the product that are
producing the most support calls, feedback emails, or training questions.


Top Tips: Lower Costs
Tip 3: Put the product on a “feature diet.”
More is nearly always less, and it’s often a challenge for even the most
well-staffed and well-funded product teams to make all features usable.
Couple that with the fact that many companies are not even sure which
features their users actually utilize, and the product may have features
that users don’t even want or need, that are hard to use, and that are
creating noise and interference in the UI.
g
Users get confused or distracted if there is too much noise in the
product.
Such features also require ongoing maintenance and internal support
and QA i each release.
d in h l
Tip 4: Train your product team in usability techniques.
While all usability consultants would love to tell you that only usability
consultants can guide product usability, the simple truth is that all
members of the team can contribute to product usability.
Short training courses (such as those offered by UEVision ;)) and online
resources and articles can teach bootstrap techniques for design
design,
testing, validation, and research, that your team members can apply
at any time in the product lifecycle.

Increase Customer Satisfaction


Increased Customer Satisfaction
Customers are evaluating every dollar and are often open to looking around for
lower-cost and higher-value alternatives, especially in a down economy.

Ease of use differentiates products in a highly competitive market place, bringing
an added value that culminates in a higher degree of customer satisfaction,
continued business and higher revenues.

But usability techniques such as testing and design alone do not inform customer
satisfaction with your products. Customer satisfaction is certainly connected to
product usability, but should be measured and managed as a piece of the product
usability equation.

Ease of use, learnability, and the belief that their voices and requests are being
heard and integrated into the product all contribute to overall customer
satisfaction.

In this section, we’ll share usability best practices so you can keep more of
your current customers from straying, and even attract new customers,
despite the downturn.


Fun Usability Facts: Customer Satisfaction
When systems match user needs and requests, customer satisfaction
[often] improves dramatically. In a Gartner Group study, usability
methods raised user satisfaction ratings for a system by 40%.18

A study by Computer + Software News found that prospective
customers rated ease of use second at 6.8 out of 10, while ease of
learning was rated fourth at 6 4 on a scale of important purchase
6.4
factors.19

Microsoft® Publisher attained a 92% customer satisfaction rating
through customer involvement in the design and development
process.20

One study at NCR showed a 25% increase in customer satisfaction
correlating with with an additional 25% decrease in errors resulting
from redesign of screens to follow basic principles of good design. 21


g
Oracle’s PeopleSoft Enterprise Service Solution was the first enterprise
applications vendor to deliver a complete CRM suite on a pure internet
architecture.
When developing this release of the software, Oracle placed a major
emphasis on integrating both usability feedback and customer
satisfaction metrics into the development and delivery process.
More than 40 major CRM customers including HP Norstan Belgacom
customers, HP, Norstan, Belgacom,
Merck, and France Telecom, provided detailed feedback and participated
in extensive testing.
Consequently, numerous usability features were introduced. The results
included:
30 percent improvement in performance.
38 percent improvement in usability.
The suite won numerous usability and customer satisfaction awards
awards,
including:
The highest owner satisfaction ranking of all the major enterprise application
vendors, according to Forrester Research.
2004 CRM Market Leader Award, CRM Magazine, for customer satisfaction and
product innovation.

Top Tips: Increasing Customer Satisfaction
p p g
Tip 1: Survey your customers’ satisfaction levels.
It may seem obvious, but if you don’t know how satisfied your customers
are with your product, you’ll need to start the process by finding out.
Measuring customer satisfaction through qualitative surveys is a
convenient and inexpensive way to capture feedback and prioritize
changes.
changes
The process can be accomplished in these simple steps:
Capture Representative Feedback: Don’t worry about surveying everyone; a
qualitative survey that samples from representatives of each customer user type will
suffice.
suffice We typically recommend surveying approximately 10-12 users from each user
segment.
Prioritize Changes and Enhancements: Once you have the initial feedback and a list
of changes and enhancements, the list will most likely be more than your team can
possible tackle at one time or in one release. Prioritize the changes based on the
feedback received, and work them into the development cycle along with other priority
received
changes.
Test Improvements with Actual Customers: As the changes and enhancements are
added to the product, test them with actual customers and users prior to releasing them
to the larger community.
Measure Satisfaction Regularly: As you make changes and enhancements, regularly
check back with customers about their satisfaction levels.



Tip 2: Start a Customer Feedback Program.
What’s almost as important to product success as a highly-usable
product? The belief that your customers have that your company is
engaged in a consistent and sincere effort to listen to their feedback
and to work it into a cycle of ongoing improvement.
Starting a Customer Feedback Program can be as simple as
gathering together 8 10 of your friendliest customers in web
8-10 web-
based quarterly meetings to discuss upcoming features, present
new design ideas, and gather feedback and ideas.
The rapport that develops between your team and your
customers is invaluable the product design and development cycle,
as the customer becomes a “real” recipient of the product rather
than an abstract concept.
Customers will also develop a stronger sense of their voices “being
being
heard,” even if feature and enhancement requests are not
implemented immediately.



Tip 3: Hold Customer Brainstorming Sessions to
gather enhancements and improvement ideas.
Believe or not, customers love to give their ideas about how
to make a product they use better than it is currently.
While some software professionals may still cling to the outdated
notion that “users don’t know what they want until we tell them”,
real-life examples of successful products and companies show
that notion simply not to be true.
py
Customer satisfaction starts and ends with how useful customers
find your product, not with long feature lists or cool, bleeding-
edge technologies.
By gathering ideas from your customers about your product, your
team has the opportunity to innovate with the product in ways
that might otherwise not be apparent.


Increase Profitability
y


Increased Profitability
y
As companies compete for smaller pools of dollars, the need to be
the very best becomes even stronger.

Increasingly, the impression of a company’s brand is linked to the
usability of its products. Some companies differentiate themselves
by improving usability of existing products, and others base their
entire brand on product usability.
Whichever the path, when an organization finds an innovative way to solve a
problem, the result positions them as an innovator and brings value to the brand.

Your products (and product demos) need to “wow!” your prospects
and customers and we’ll present tips on how to do just that in this
we ll
section.

In this section we’ll talk about how to increase product and
section,
company profitability.

Fun Usability Facts: Increased Profitability
A major computer company spent $20,700 on usability work to
improve the sign-on procedure in a system used by several thousand
people.
The
Th resulting productivity i
lti d ti it improvement saved the company $41,700
t d th $41 700
the first day the system was used.
On a system used by over 100,000 people, for a usability outlay of
$68,000, the same company recognized a benefit of $6,800,000
, , p y g , ,
within the first year of the system's implementation. (This is inline with
the cost-benefit ratio of $1:$100.) 25

To build
T b ild a model i t
d l intranet, B N t
t Bay Networks spent $3 million and two years
k t illi dt
studying the different ways people think about the same thing.
The result: they saved $10 million each year it was in use.26

Sun Microsystems has shown how spending about $20,000 could yield a
savings of $152 million dollars.
Each and every dollar invested could return $7,500 in savings.27
y g


Fun Facts: Increased Profitability
One case study of a usability-engineered software product for a well-known
software company showed that increased revenue by more than 80% over
the first release of the product (built without usability work).
The revenues of the usability-enhanced system were 60% higher than projected.
Many customers cited usability as a key factor in buying the new system.23

Because there are so many poorly designed websites, when customers
websites
find one that "works", they tend to do repeat business and gain trust in the
organization.
One study estimated that improving the customer experience increases the
number of buyers b 40% and i
b fb by d increase order size b 10% 22
d i by 10%.

After move.com completed the redesign of the home "search" and
"contact an agent" features based on a UI consulting firm's
contact agent firm s
recommendations, users ability to find a home increased from 62% to 98%,
sales lead generation to real estate agents increased over 150%, and
[move.com's] ability to sell advertising space on move.com improved
significantly 24
significantly.


Real World
Incumbent organizations that struggle to incorporate usability into
their software products lose a key differentiator for their combined
instrumentation/software products

FlowJo™ is a software product that is having a disruptive effect on
p g p
the flowcytometry market.

It was developed by a company that doesn’t event make Biotech
instrumentation, but it has gained significant market share due to
i t t ti b t h i d i ifi t k t h d t
its usability. 28

The
Th result:lt
Competitors instrumentation (in a commoditized industry) when
partnered with the FlowJo product are not only competing, but
are taking market share
share.


Top Tips: Increasing Profitability
Tip 1: Redesign a key feature that will differentiate your product
from the competition.
Is there one feature or module in the product that y
p your competition
p
consistently uses to differentiate (and to win) customers and prospects?
For example, do prospects rave about the dashboard that your top
competitor has, or how easy their installation and configuration process
is compared to your product’s installalion process?
product s
Don’t wait until the next full product redesign to address these
competitive issues – redesign that feature now, and get a leg up on the
competition.

Tip 2: Give your product UI a “facelift.”
While a large-scale product redesign may not be feasible, or the next-generation
g p g y g
of the product may still be 12-18 months out, a UI “refresh” is a great alternative
to refreshing an aging product.
Changing the visual designs, graphics, and colors of the product can also provide
usability gains, as well as making your existing product look fresh and new (and
competitive) to prospects and customers alike.


Top Tips: Increasing Profitability
Tip 3: Start the next-generation design work now.
So the next version of the product or site is still 12 months out?
Build a working demo or prototype to show customers and prospects to
prospects,
demonstrate the forward-thinking ideas of your product team.
Conveniently, you can also use for usability validation and feedback.

Tip 4: Make every release a “usability” release.
Frequently, companies announce to customers that a specific product version is
the “usability release”, as if usability enhancements can only be released in
batches.
Make every release a usability release by including usability enhancements on
the list of changes.


In Conclusion
When the economy is in a downturn companies are frequently
downturn,
tempted to put product usability and user interface (UI) projects on
the budgetary chopping block as a means of cutting short term costs,
without consider the impact of such cuts.
A lack of appropriate tools and metrics to measure the real cost and
ROI of usability on the product is often the source of belief that
cutting usability will not have a real business impact.
But, as we have discussed, usability can directly affect:
Support, maintenance, and development costs
Customer satisfaction; and
Ultimately, profitability.
By treating usability as an integrated and essential step of the
p
product development cycle, companies can not only avoid the
p y , p y
temptation to jettison it in tougher economic times, but can nurture
ongoing usability efforts that will deliver direct results to your
customers, company, and ultimately, your company’s bottom line ….


Q&A
Questions?
Thoughts?
Ideas?

33

Thank you for attending!
If you would like more information or if you want to
discuss usability ideas, please contact me:

Phone: 415.325.4905
Email: sarah@uevision.com
www.uevision.com


Contact Information

Sarah Kling, CEO
g,
UEVision, Inc.
www.uevision.com
www uevision com
Phone: 415.325.4905
Email: sarah@uevision.com


References
1. “Alerbox: 8/8/1997, Jakob Nielsen
2. “The T bl
2 “Th Trouble with Cith Computers”, T
t ” Tom L d Landauer
3. Bias and Mayhew, 1994
4. Pressman, 1992
5. Martin & McClure, 1983
6. Bias & Mayhew, 1994
7. Dray & Karat, 1994
10. Human Factors International, 2001)
11. Dray, 1995
13. Bosert, 1991
16. “Clean, cutting-edge UI design cuts McAfee's support calls by 90%” Bruce Hadley, 2005
g g g y y
17. Oracle Whitepaper http://www.oracle.com/media/peoplesoft/en/pdf/whitepapers/e_crm_wp_usabilitycustsvcapps_42005.pdf
20. “Microsoft Publisher Gets an "A" in Customer Satisfaction; Publisher 2000 Works to Keep Up the Grade”
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/1999/mar99/pubsatpr.mspx
21. Gallaway, 1981
22. Creative Good, 2000
23. Vividence, 2001
25. Fabris, 1999
26. Rhodes, 2000
27. http://www.pragmaticmarketing.com/publications/magazine/4/5/0610klsg/?searchterm=usability


Final Thoughts
Some final thoughts:
Engage usability expertise if you are serio s abo t impro ing your prod ct and
sabilit e pertise o serious about improving o r product
need support to deliver enhancements in design or greater value to your evolving
user community.
Employ actual/real users. Complex applications require domain-specific
knowledge.
knowledge Though it might be easier to enlist someone from another department
to run through a quick user test, the results are likely to be questionable.
Include representatives from all critical departments. Too often, testing and
user-research limits the participants to UI designers and Marketing. Developers,
business analysts and technical leads should play an active role in the usability
analysts,
process.
Usability test early and test often. Usability testing should continue throughout
the design and development cycle. The most common mistake is to test an
application when it is near completion—at a time when changes are most costly
completion at costly.


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