Workscape Institute

Over the past few years, the B2B software world has seen a dramatic shift in the amount of value placed on user experience with regards to web-based applications. This is evident from the push towards newer technologies such as Adobe’s Flash, Flex and AIR and Microsoft’s Silverlight to build customer-facing applications or enterprise software such as employee self-service applications.

Why is this so important?

Follow up:

One of the reasons is easy to quantify. Imagine you plan to roll out some enterprise application to be used in your organization of say, 10,000 employees. Now imagine that every week each employee uses this application, perhaps to submit status reports or track their hours. You may think the user experience is not that big of a deal, but a more effective interface can make the user more efficient in the use of the application. What might appear to be a superficial difference in the “design” of competing applications can have a big impact in the total cost of ownership for the chosen tool.

For example, it is reasonable to say that a better UI can reduce the time it takes to perform a task by two minutes during each use. How important is two minutes? The time savings would be:

• 2 minutes x 10000 employees x 48 weeks = 960,000 minutes
• 960,000 minutes / 60 = 16,000 hours of lost productivity
• If the average fully-weighted (wages/salary & benefits) annual cost per employee is $50,000, that averages to
• $50,000 / 2080 (52 x 40) hours per year  = $24 per hour
• 16,000 hours x $24 dollars = $384,000 lost per year for a single task!

Add on top of that the costs of incorrectly entered information and calling the help desk or customer support.  Also, don’t forget that if the application is difficult to use, employees will put off using it. This could lead to less accurate data and have downstream effects for other systems relying on that data.

Think about applications in which people spend much more time and you can really see the impact. In many cases a better designed UI can have a much larger effect than a two minute savings.

In worse cases, the effects of struggling through a confusing interface can extend well beyond the time spent using it, leaving the user feeling irritated and demotivated. And, negative feelings about an interface can have a lasting impression. Remember the old jokes about VCRs being so difficult to program? Many years have passed since VCR’s exhibited the famously difficult user interfaces yet the memory stays with us. You wouldn’t want your customers or employees remembering the applications you put in front of them this way, would you?