Revenue Impact - Usability & UX

‘It’s quite normal for e-commerce sites to increase sales by 100% or more as a result of usability. More important, they can probably avoid 9 of 10 returns by eliminating most mis-designed items (a 1000% improvement of the error rate metric).’- Jakob Nielsen-

 What is Usability and User Experience?

Definitions

Usability is a term that encompasses everything to do with “ease of use.” That is, how easily the user can use any product’s controls or displays. Usability also refers to the study of methods, measurement and principles of a product’s efficiency, elegance, and usefulness. In the computer industry, usability often refers to the ease of use in terms of the human-computer interaction. The clarity, intuitiveness, seamlessness and elegance of an application or website interface, concept and design. User Experience (abbreviated: UX) is the quality of experience a person has when interacting with a specific product, service, system, or organization. If a user is also a customer, user experience can be called ‘customer experience’.

 Why Usability and User Experience?

Benefits

The idea behind usability is to design products with the user in mind. The design process yields greater efficiency, learning time and satisfaction when the user is put first in the priority list. This process is often referred to as an optimized “user experience.” The goal of optimized usability is to make a product easy to understand, easy to use and easy to learn. The outcome of good usability is a greater likelihood of user acceptance. User acceptance is often the difference between a product’s success or failure in the marketplace. Users often reject a well-engineered product with great functionality if they are unable to understand, learn and easily use that product.

Facts

Leading companies like IBM, Microsoft, Apple, Google, Whirlpool, and Proctor & Gamble have invested heavily in UXE (User Experience Engineering), which has yielded significant returns on investment (ROI). Research has demonstrated that ROI for enhancing the user experience is impressive: $1 invested returns between $3.0 and $100. Increasing product sales, enhancing user productivity, decreasing development and support costs, and reducing deployment risks accomplish this ROI.

Primary Focus: The Delivery of Services That Drive Revenues

 How is UX Engineered?

Strategy

Achieving an optimized user experience requires a systematic approach to usability in the design process. This is accomplished through expert empirical usability testing where naïve users can be observed to determine what works and what doesn’t. Changing the design parameters to accommodate the results of usability testing permits an optimized user interface design. This must be, however, kept in mind that user experience and usability is not merely about design and graphics; it’s about a whole impression altogether. Other than better graphic techniques, rich Internet application techniques, such as AJAX, Adobe Flash, Flex, Java, and Silverlight have evolved that have the potential to improve the user-experience in browser-based applications.