CPSC 681 - Topic Cost - Justifying Usability

Investment on usability pays off better than any other business action but it is well known that the usability engineering is not that much applied in practice. One reason is the high cost of evaluation studies. To have a better justification of the costs of each usability evaluation we need to estimate costs of running a controlled evaluation in organization as well as the benefits of successful improvements. Although, different metrics are used for cost-benefit analysis, at the end, the manager is the one who has a rough estimation of the total saving achieved after improvements. Usability specialists usually propose the best methodologies instead of being economically conservative. Insisting on using the best methods may come up to nothing. Discount usability suggests being more conservative and focuses on “the good” than “the best”. This brings more chance for usability activities to be accepted. This report reviews a good and economically viable approach that applies different metrics (applicable to every business) to create a cost-benefit framework for usability evaluation. In this report, we briefly discuss return on investment (ROI) in usability engineering; as a worked example, we present a case study on cost-benefit analysis of a particular method (Heuristic Evaluation) on a sample project.