This is from an email exchange I’ve had with a non-UX practitioner.
“HELP - I’ve got to explain what UX is to a group of developers, business people, etc.&Â I’m building Line of Business applications”
There are three quotes I’d think about:
“The product is the experience†– Howard D. Schultz, Chairman of Starbucks
“Questions about whether design is necessary or affordable are quite beside the point:
design is inevitable.
The alternative to good design is bad design, not no design at all.
Everyone makes design decisions all the time without realizing it …and good design is simply the result of making these decisions consciously…†– Douglas Martin (book designer)
“You cannot not have a [user] experience†– Clued In, Lou Carbone
CEO, Experience Engineering
The common misconception about UX is that it’s solely focused on aesthetics. UX is actually the systematic study of constituencies to understand and solve their implicit and explicit needs. Put another way, UX is about properly defining the requirements of the system such that it is useful, understandable and pleasurable to use. Aesthetics is a tool used to solve these needs, not an end in and of itself.
From there, I might go down the path of taking the average hourly wage of your company and calculate the cost of the extra time spent each time a user has to use one of these apps.
x/hour * number of people * number of hours of lost time = x
I’d also be sure to include some swag numbers around formal training, support costs, and the time spent by employees helping each other to understand the system.
x + training costs + support costs + peer training costs = y
If there are costs for errors, include those too. There are almost certainly tools that individual employees have developed to help them use the system (excel spreadsheets, access databases, etc). These have a cost as well. This will probably add up to a surprisingly large number.
y + cost of mistakes + ad hoc tool creation cost = cost of bad / poor UX in LoB Applications
From there, it’s not a hard thing to get to an ROI / NPV type discussion. This is a matter of knowing how your organization financially justifies it’s investments and tailoring the spreadsheet accordingly. UX almost always pays for itself if you measure the external costs of the system properly – most people don’t.
What strategies have you used to justify design in a non-design organization?
Related Posts:
- See Will Here: TiE Panel discussion on July 26th, 6-9pm Santa Clara, CA
- Announcing Express Yourself
- Read Will Here
0 responses so far ↓
There are no comments yet...Kick things off by filling out the form below.