Usability – Facts and Forecasts

It's hard to measure the market potential of user-friendliness. Experts agree, however, that poor usability can hurt sales and that in many cases a lack of user-friendliness in consumer articles has a direct impact on vendors' balance sheets. Hard-to-use items can lead to unmanageable demand for customer support and overburdened hotlines, which drive costs up and can cause sales to stagnate. "Companies that invest in user-friendliness tap into considerable potential for increased sales and cost savings," says Frank Heidmann of the Fraunhofer Institute for Work Sciences and Technology Management (IAO) in Stuttgart.

In 1999, for example, computer manufacturer IBM succeeded in increasing its online sales by 400 % after implementing a uniform design for 200,000 of its corporate webpages. PC producer Dell increased its average daily sales from $1 million to $34 million by relaunching its website in 1999.

Returns on usability are considerable in the online sector. U.S. market research firm Nielsen Norman Group, which specializes in usability issues, estimates that companies can make a product twice as user-friendly by spending 10 % of the project budget on improved usability. Furthermore, every dollar that a company invests in the usability of its websites produces a ten- to hundredfold return, according to IBM.

Usability has also been an important concern for years when it comes to developing telecommunications products, automation systems and medical devices. The focus is normally on ease-of-use, clear user interfaces and a high level of "learnability," which together allow efficient and effective deployment of the technology. In 2004, for example, Siemens Hearing Solutions will launch Connexx 5.0, an improved software application for adjusting hearing aids. The company hopes the software will reach new target groups. Part of the motivation behind this development is the fact that, in many countries, hearing aids are adjusted by dealers and not by trained acousticians.

"With the new software, Siemens now hopes to make the tuning of the devices easier for non-specialized hearing aid vendors," says Stefan Schoen, head of the Siemens User Interface Design Center.

"We expect that the new software will help us to increase our sales and profits," says Eduard Kaiser, product manager at Siemens Hearing Solutions. "But," he adds with a note of caution. "It will be very difficult to quantify the effect precisely, since other factors also play a role."

Measuring Usability. Usually, however, companies lack usability-related sales and cost data. "But without figures drawn from past experience, many companies budget insufficient resources for this area, or none at all," says usability expert Kerstin Röse, who is an assistant professor for user-centered product development at the University of Kaiserslautern and president of the German chapter of the Usability Professionals' Association (www.gc-upa.de). "In contrast to the PC and online sector, many manufacturers of industrial goods still view investments in improved ease-of-use as a nice addition, but not really necessary. And that's a serious mistake," says Röse.

The software industry, on the other hand, has known since the late 1990s that poor usability costs the U.S. economy around $30 billion per year in productivity losses, according to the Nielsen Norman Group. Manufacturers hurt themselves not only by neglecting usability entirely but also by attending to it too late in the design process. "The later user-friendliness changes are taken into account during product development, the more expensive they are for a company," says Fraunhofer expert Heidmann. Conversely, companies reap extra gains from considering usability early. Indeed, as far back as the mid 1990s, renowned American usability consultant Deborah Mayhew discovered that user-friendliness testing helped reduce development times at one U.S. company by up to 40 %.

Anette Freise