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Jessica Gremillion
337 PointsThe value of UX work
I work for a software company and am on a team of 2 who have taken on being, essentially, UXers. We're revamping our software/website and it is a lot of work for just two people (who also have other responsibilities). I have found this series very helpful. I did have a question, though.
It has come up in some meetings from a higher-up and they would like to put some sort of dollar figure on the work we do. Like, if we spend 10 hours on the interface, that will make us $10,000 more. I really don't know how to respond to this. It seems like a foolish question to me. How would you guys respond to this?
2 Answers
Kevin Korte
28,148 PointsI think this is largely why most software UX sucks. UX is organic. I'm not sure how you would put a dollar figure on it. I think it's safe to say the more intuitive you make your software through great UX, the more customers your software would attract.
I suppose you could do some focus research groups. Give people a polished but scaled down test version of your UX designed software, and have users compare it to using your competition's.
Maybe find people who do use your competition's software, give them some tasks to do on yours, and see if based on the new UX of yours, if they would consider switching over. Than I suppose you could project a percentage of market share growth based on your focus groups, and that projected market share growth could give you a dollar figure expected gain.
But without actually doing some heavy UX work first, and than focus group testing it, you might as well guess a return value by blindfolding yourself and throwing darts at the wall, IMO
Plus, your foucs group testing could provide valuable UX feedback too, before you get to a finished product. Great UX is something nobody notices. Poor UX everybody notices through frustration and confusion.
James Barnett
39,199 PointsUsing A/B testing, you should be able to get a hard number of the usability improvement. I'd also suggest tracking conversion and churn rates over time to see if they are going down. Once you'e got those numbers you can calculate the ROI of your UX efforts.
further reading
- ROI of User Experience (short YouTube video)
- User Experience Design: It Isn't About Pretty, It's About Money (webinar)
- The business value of UX: Taking ROI to an institutional level (whitepaper)
Jessica Gremillion
337 PointsThis sounds like something we could measure after the work is done. But what about before, to kind of "justify" the work before it's started? With a team of 2 people who already are over-worked and are the only two people at the company who understand what we're talking about, who are basically on their own but also having to work quickly within developers' timeline?
Jessica Gremillion
337 PointsGreat video, btw! Thanks for sharing =)
James Barnett
39,199 Points> But what about before, to kind of "justify" the work before it's started?
I'd check out this article. You can't put a number of something you've yet to do, you have no data with which to project from. However you can show a
Check out this article on the benefits of User-centered Design to get you started with showing there is a correlation between time spent on UX work and reduced Total Cost of Ownership (TCO).
James Barnett
39,199 PointsJames Barnett
39,199 Points>UX is organic. I'm not sure how you would put a dollar figure on it.I'd beg to differ.
While User-Centered Design is a large part of the User Experience field and is organic, another large part is usability research and we can answer questions about that with with Science.