Usability and the Bottom Line

Cost–benefit analysis Although usability’s broad benefits are impressive, a cost-benefit analysis might be a necessary first step in introducing usability into your organization or a particular project. In usability cost-benefit analyses, the goal is to estimate the costs and benefits of specific usability activities—such as prototyping, usability testing, heuristic evaluation, and so on—and contrast them with the likely costs of not conducting the activities. The analysis has four steps: