"The rule of thumb in many usability-aware organizations is that the cost-benefit ratio for usability is $1:$10-$100."
Source: Gilb 1988

The difference usability makes to potential revenue and usage can be huge because it’s so easy for a user to go elsewhere – dissatisfied users will often leave a site after only a few seconds and most will never return. Make sure your visitors stay, whether you’re selling or not. 

I spend my life learning about, anticipating, testing & predicting behaviour to get it right first time because that's all you get on the web to impress a potential customer.

The financial rewards

It is a reality that the case for investing in a website, especially one that already exists and is generating revenue, has to demonstrate the potential for financial rewards. And the good news is that usability does in droves, increasing revenues and reducing costs.

One of my happiest moments was seeing a short redesign project of how RAC sold breakdown online double sales overnight. They are coming to buy so make it easy and pleasant for them answering the questions they have without them needing to phone the call centre and also help them fill in the online form correctly so the call centre does not need to ring them and clarify - that means cost savings too!

It also applies big time to intranets and internal IT systems. For government and not-for-profit organization websites the benefits are still salient, especially where they are concerned with reducing internal costs.

The beauty of usability is that not only does it produce a better product and give you a real world view, but you can do it in the early stages of development when it is much more cost effective to change your designs.

Giving your website some TLC (tender loving care) needn’t be expensive – for one you can buy a copy of my forthcoming book and lavish some time on going through the checklists and making tweaks. Tweaking should not be expensive nor time consuming – if it is, there is a fundamental problem with the build. If your site is in dire straits you may need a complete redesign but if it is so bad the upturn should more the counter the cost. This assumes the costs are reasonable -  as an aside one company I worked for were paying quarter of a million UK pounds every quarter to an agency just for maintaining the unusable but award winning site! That’s what I’d expect to pay for an all singing, all dancing, hundred page plus, full ecommerce site with bells on done from scratch. Fortunately those days are gone when agencies took the michael with their charges.

So here’s the music to delight the Financial Director’s ears…

Usable web design equals: 

• Increased customer conversion
• Increased sales
• typically lower cost of sale with online
• fewer user errors which invalidate orders or take resource to follow up and fix them
• Increased customer satisfaction + loyalty
  • -   therefore repeat business potential and word of mouth recommendation
• Increased competitive advantage

Usable intranet / internal IT system equals:

• More productive employees
• Less training time needed
• Decreased support costs
• Lower error rates
• Increased usage & ROI
  • -   especially in knowledge management tools

Accessibility builds on usability principles so brings the benefits above but in addition deals admirably with bandwidth, browser compatibility, device independence and support issues.

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