Several studies showed that programmers spend around 50% of their time at redundant work. If UX is involved in a project at an early stage, it will be easier to define goals and requirements, reducing the amount of rework and making it possible to have a more clear roadmap.
Good UX maximizes profits and minimizes costs
Adjustments to requirements in an already running project increase the costs with a factor 10 in each stage. This means that correcting a problem in the development phase will cost 10 times more than in the design phase. The same problem will cost around 100 times more if it?s already in production. This means that the initial cost of UX almost disappears if you can avoid bigger problems at the end. Decent research and testing are essential for any project!
How to calculate the return?
Conversion
Example: how many people bought a product after visiting a webshop?
Drop off rate
Example: back to our webshop. How many people, and in what stage, have left the shop during the ordering process. This might indicate a problem with the usability of the website that is costing revenues.
SUM: Single Usability Metric
Another tool to calculate the return of UX in a standardized way is the SUM technique. We look at how it long it takes to complete a task and if people are actually able to complete the task. We take a deep dive into the number of errors made and the satisfaction of the user.
Other
In a business context, we also need ways to define the return in hard cash.? Typically we look into cost savings and productivity.
Example: there are some errors in a software tool used by employees. This means he?s not able to work in an efficient way and is losing time.
- (amount of errors) x (average time loss) x (employee cost) x (amount of employees) = amount saved
- Example:
(2 errors a week) x (60 minutes / error time loss) = 120 minutes = 2 hours a week time lost
Employee cost =? ?30/hour x 2 = ?60/week
?60 x 100 employees = ?6 000 lost / week or ?312 000 lost / year
This shows that a mistake that might look small could have a big financial impact. Next to that, we also have to handle the frustration of an employee who has to work with inefficient tools.
Interested in how we can transform your business? Feel free to contact us!
