Usability and enterprise applications – a surefire money-saver?

– posted August 11th, 2009 by Finan O'Donoghue No comments

Did you ever wonder if your company might be losing money by not focusing on usability for its enterprise applications – the apps your business uses internally?

I have been thinking about the answer to that question, and the topic of enterprise applications usability - or lack thereof - for a long time.

Since joining iQ Content earlier this year, I have had the opportunity to formulate and galvanise my thoughts on this some more.

Learning from my own experience

Prior to joining iQ, I worked as a senior business/systems analyst. I spent every day gathering and analysing requirements, writing requirements, functional and use case specifications, signing off test scripts, technical design documents and other documents you would traditionally associate with the software development life cycle.

During that time, I also worked with most of the methodologies used for software development.

I can safely say that not one development methodology called for the application of usability design principles.

This was and is a large and costly gap.

Why the gap?

It’s important to note that the absence of usability design principles was by no means the fault of the individuals, project teams or companies I worked with.

Rather, it was a fundamental flaw in the software development methodologies being used.

I’m certain that if usability design were introduced to any software development methodology, the impact would be immediate - and hugely positive.

That’s all wonderful, I hear you say, give me an example…

Well, today more than ever before, IT development managers are having to fight tooth and nail for every euro they want to spend on the development of their applications.

Being able to show a return on investment in this area has never been more important.

So let’s imagine:

You are the IT development manager for a large mobile operator
Your company has 2 million customers
Its call centre handles 2.5 million support calls every year
The average support call lasts for 4 minutes
It costs your company €0.80 per minute for each support call

The upshot being that the annual cost to your company for customer care support is €8,000,000 (2.5 million calls x 4mins x €0.80).

Now imagine that the customer care applications used in the call centre have never had usability factored into their design.

You decide to address this.

What do you do?

Select the five pieces of functionality most used by your call centre team
Review the usability of each piece of functionality end-to-end
Implement usability improvements to the applications based on findings
This improves efficiency to the effect that the average call duration drops from 4 minutes to 3.5

The result

We now see a radically different story. The annual cost to your company for support is now €7,000,000 (2.5 million calls x 3.5mins x €0.80).

An annual saving of €1,000,000 for a project that probably cost a fraction of that figure. A massive return on investment in one year alone.

Imagine this multiplied by five or ten years, and you really begin to see the value of investing in usability.

This example is a very powerful calculation that shows the monumental importance of ensuring optimum user experience design is applied to every application, whether you are:

Developing it bespoke from scratch
Making additions or enhancements to an existing bespoke built application
Customising an out-of-the-box application

Further benefits

There are many other real and tangible benefits that can be achieved by applying usability design to your enterprise applications.

More revenue: increased conversion rates, increased customer retention, and opportunities to cross/up-sell.
Improved productivity: improved usability will ensure a wider and faster user uptake of an application.
Reduced (costly) customisation: if you get it right first time, chances are you will only have to customise the application once.
Reduced training time: if an application is easier to use it will be easier and faster to train users. There are real cost savings to be gained in this area for organisations with large call centres, given that the churn rate of staff and associated training costs are often very high.
Lowered support costs: improved usability will mean less support tickets are raised.
Reduced project time and cost overrun: it is much easier, cheaper and less time consuming to change the design of an application at the beginning of the project lifecycle before the the development has taken place.

And the benefits go on. The beauty being that pretty much all of them have a positive revenue or cost saving impact.

(I’d recommend visiting Forrester Research for lots of great reports on this topic.)

Enterprise app usability – case closed?

So the next time you’re developing your enterprise applications, remember that it pays to stop and think about the importance of usability design.

Even better – take action

Why not become your company’s usability champion. You’re sure to save and make your company money (and it may even get you some brownie points with the boss).

Preaching to the converted?

If you’ve already championed enterprise app usability within your company, let us know about it – it would be great to hear your story.

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Categories Technology, Usability