User experience (UX) is the science and art of designing products such as a website or software application to be easy to use. These products should meet the expectations of users and meet their business goals.

There is a whole methodology related to UX design, and sometimes people ask me if so much effort on user experience is even worth it. Let's talk about return of investment (eng. Return on investment = ROI) if you include UX in your business.

IEEE is a professional organization that publishes reports and conducts research for programmers, developers and engineers. They published an article called Why the software failed.

Here are some interesting facts from that article.

They estimate that approximately one billion dollars is spent annually worldwide in information technology. The percentage of projects abandoned because they are hopelessly inadequate includes about 15% of all projects in total.

The percentage of income that goes to the IT group is five percent of the company's total income, and rises to ten percent, if it is a financial or telecommunications company. The amount of time developers spend rewriting their work, which is actually avoidable, amounts to 50% of their time.

Error correction costs after project development are 100 times bigger than they would be if the error were corrected before its completion. From the first 12 reasons why projects fail, 3 out of 12 are directly related to what we call UX or user-centered design work. Those are: 

• poorly defined requirements
• poor communication between customers, developers and users
• bad contract

The work that UX experts do includes interviews with contracting parties, research and testing. Based on this, the central design is devised. This is what can correct at least 3 of the 12 main reasons for software failure.

In fact, you can calculate how much you would save or earn extra, how much you would benefit from paying attention to the user experience of your product. Examples are coming. 

Let's say you have a website and people can donate money through it, but the part of the user interface that deals with searching the site and making a donation is very confusing and complicated to use. A huge number of customers will leave the site before even making a donation. All because of bad user experience.

Let's do some calculations.

Let each customer donate an average of 50 euros during the year. If you have 50 potential customers a day, you lose 2,500 euros per day or 912,500 euros per year.

If you spend 50,000 euros to solve user experience problems and another 50,000 euros for e.g. to rewrite the programming code based on those UX improvements, we can estimate that you will spend 100,000 euros to improve the user experience. You will need 40 days, i.e. just over a month to recoup your investment of course, assuming you would earn €912,500 per year.

There are many measurements that would be important, and one of them is e.g. conversion rate. It's the number or percentage of site visitors who buy or donate through that site, or it doesn't even have to be directly related to money. It can simply be some action you want your visitors to take, e.g. to register on the site. 

You might also be interested in reducing the number of people who leave the site. Reducing customer support calls, too. 

If you improve the user experience, you can also reduce the time it takes people to train. First of all, I am thinking of cases where within the company you have your own internal software application that employees should learn to use.

Maybe you want more people to use your app, or for each of them to use it more often. Maybe you want to save time for users or you want to save time for developers. Maybe mistakes are what you're trying to reduce. Whichever measure you choose, calculating your return on investment (ROI) is a way to see the value of UX to your business.

Einstein said it best: Any intelligent fool can make things harder and more complicated than they are. It takes a touch of genius and a lot of courage to push things in the opposite direction.

If you want your customers to be satisfied while using your site, to make appointments or purchases easier on it and therefore gladly come back to buy again - decide on a design according to the principles of user experience. Learn more by clicking on this link.

Source: youtube.com/HFIvideo