Quantifying the value of User Experience

Over the years, certain technology development disciplines have become ingrained in project planning – business analysis, project management, coding, architecture, testing, etc. Recently, User Experience (UX) is another discipline that is breaking in to that well-defined methodology and becoming an integral part of the development process. While Business Analysts and Project Managers have focused on developing user-centric technology for years, the UX discipline is specifically dedicated to bringing empathetic user perspectives and human-computer interaction practices to every development effort.

The primary difficulty in breaking in to the project planning process is that few technology leaders have worked with UX resources and have not yet built an appreciation for the discipline. Clients and other stakeholders also see this as an add-on resource that adds cost to the project without tangible benefit.

This paper addresses these concerns by highlighting specific benefits that have been observed after integrating UX into technology efforts.

Reduce Development and Maintenance Costs

Technologists know that it is faster and less expensive to deliver an application if all requirements are fully articulated before starting the project. It is also uncommon for this to be fully realized. Experts have spent time specifically quantifying the impact of incomplete knowledge of the project requirements:

• In a widely used textbook, Robert Pressman explains that for every dollar spent researching functionality during the design phase, $10 is required to alter the functionality during development, and $100 or more after release.¹
• It is estimated that roughly 50% of development time is devoted to the user interface. Incorporating a strong UX strategy up front is critical to limiting development time.²
• Of all IT projects initiated, 5-15% are abandoned before or shortly after launch. Many are delivered late or well over budget. An IEEE report identified twelve common factors of failure, three of which could be mitigated by UX activities: badly defined requirements, stakeholder politics, and poor communication among customers, developers, and users.³
• Dr. Clare-Marie Karat, noted usability expert, has demonstrated that 80% of maintenance costs are due to unforeseen user requirements after initial launch.⁴
• The IEEE report noted earlier also estimates that 40-50% of work by software specialists is avoidable rework.

Our collective experience confirms these studies. Working with a broad range of Fortune 500 companies across technology platforms, we have universally observed that even a quick user-centric study upfront sets a project on a more successful course.

Stronger User Adoption Leads to Increased Revenue

The days when users would suffer through a sub-optimal experience to gain some degree of efficiency are long gone. For any given need there are dozens of potential applications. Providing an experience that aligns seamlessly with user behavior and needs leads to greater degrees of adoption and use. IBM uses a rule of thumb that says, “every dollar invested in ease of use returns $10 to $100”.⁶

While we have not yet quantified that specific level of return, in our experience there is a measurable difference between efforts that involve significant time creating user-centric experience and those that did not. For example, one award-winning application we designed for GE Healthcare resulted in significantly higher adoption and use, as well as lower training costs. Below is further support that a user-centric experience will lead to cost savings and increased revenue:

• A broad survey by Forrester Research found that 15.8% fewer customers are likely to consider switching providers when offered an improved user experience.⁷
• Bank of America applied usability principles while redesigning their online banking enrollment application. As a result, successfully completed applications increased by 45%.⁸
• Forrester found that 14.4% more customers are willing to purchase from a company that provides a superior experience.⁹
• United Airlines modeled the traveler’s experience to inform a new website design. The resulting website increased online ticketing by over 200%.¹⁰
• Following extensive research, the redesign of Wal-Mart’s shopping cart resulted in 214% increase in the number of visitors, and over 160% increase in sales.¹¹
• After redesigning the architecture of a state government portal site, user success of finding information increased from 72% to 95%, reducing time to find information by 62%, and resulting in higher user satisfaction ratings. Revenue also increased by at least $552,000.¹²
• Anthropologie realized a 24% increase in conversion rate by implementing a new, easy-to-use checkout system.¹³
• From our experience, Jones Lang LaSalle saw online leads and referrals increase from virtually zero to over 1,500 following a full user-centric redesign in 2008.

________________________________________________________________________________

1 Pressman, R.S. (1992). Software Engineering: A Practitioner’s Approach. McGraw Hill, NY.
2 Weinschenk, S. (2005). Usability: A Business Case. Human Factors International, published on Web.
3 Charette, R. (2005). Why Software Fails. IEEE, published on Web.
4 Karat, C. (1997). Cost-justifying usability engineering in the software life cycle. In Helander, M., Landauer, T., and Prabhu, P. (Eds), Handbook of Human-Computer Interaction, Elsevier Science, Amsterdam.
5 Ten Things We know to be True. Google.com. n.d. Web. May 10, 2013.
6 Cost justifying ease of use. IBM.com/software/ucd. n.d. Web. May 17,
7 Guattieri, M. (2009). Best Practices in User Experience Design. Forrester, published on the Web.
8 Hirsch, S. (2004). Leveraging Business Value: How ROI Changes User Experience. Adaptive Path Reports, published on the Web.
9 Guattieri, M. (2009). Best Practices in User Experience Design. Forrester, published on the Web.
10 Karat, C. (2005). Return on Investment in Usability of Web Applications. In Bias, R.G. Cost Justifying Usability. Morgan Kaufmann, San Francisco.
11 ibid.
12 Foreker Design (2005). Usability ROI: Case Studies. Published on the Web.
13 Plesco, G. (2008). Designing Superior Shopping Experiences. User Interface Resource Center, published on the Web.

Developing a Strong Content Strategy

Similar to the weather, everyone’s talking about CONTENT, but no one’s doing anything about it. Seriously, how many pages of fresh, new client-interest content did you create for your website last week. Last month? Last year?

In the broad list of priorities every marketer has, website content development has a difficult time competing with more immediate and measurable tasks.

I’d like to propose a four-step process to get past this inertia:

1. Complete a journalistic review of your current content.

Read your Top 10 most trafficked pages. Then, go to your favorite magazine’s site and read a few articles. Notice a difference? Journalists are trained to write content that pulls you deeper in to the story. Their sites—commonly referred to as “editorial”—have much longer engagement times than most marketing sites. One article leads to a blog or reviews, which lead seamlessly to another. Would your company benefit from users spending more time on your site?

A good first step is to engage a professional journalist or a journalism student to evaluate the editorial quality of your site content. Have them grade the top 100 pages, and use these evaluations as a starting point for your work.


2. Consider content in different forms and formats

While you were on the editorial site, you probably noticed that the content comes in many formats—long-form articles, short punchy quotes, polls, videos, images, reviews, etc. It’s been proven that the more variety you offer, the more users engage.

This year, try to add two new forms of content that would be relevant to your users.


3. Create an annual editorial plan with monthly benchmarks

One of our clients recently started getting serious about refreshing content on their site by creating a biweekly homepage refresh schedule. Working with the broader marketing team on these refreshes drove a greater sense of urgency to refresh content throughout the site.

Try this, or a similar tactic to get the organization focused on fresh content for a fresh year.


4. Find efficient development resources

Interns. Freelance journalists. Two great sources for content development employed by editorial sites to publish the huge volume of content they create on an annual basis. You probably won’t get your management team or fellow marketers to write content to a level you need, but you can probably get them to sit down for an informal interview with a trained writer on your staff.

What tips are we missing? Please share your own content strategy in the comments.

Digging in to Web analytics a low priority...

Apparently 458 B2B marketers were surveyed about a wide range of web analytics and it turns out that only 6% report that they were effectively measuring online activities. (see b2bonline.com) Excluding eCommerce players, I'd say this is pretty much in line with my experience.

As the report further suggests, this is often due to staffing constraints. There are a lot of things to do, and devoting a staff member to finding issues that are not easily resolved is... well, not a priority.

Yet I have a couple of clients who I assist with their analytics on a consultative basis. It's been very helpful to them to understand the types of content and information that engage their visitors, how they navigate to the site, and when and why they leave. Being skilled at making actionable recommendations and integrating analytics into the overall marketing plan ensures that my efforts are of high value.

I do think that having a full time person pulling analytics from a marketing-centric site all the time seems unnecessary. But quarterly or annually? A necessity.

The Internet's Latest Victim -- The Traditional Marketing Department

I was reading the most recent edition of B2B Magazine on the plane yesterday and one article caught my eye. Apparently Forrester surveyed over 250 B2B interactive marketing executive last year and discovered that there is a need to realign marketing organizations to really capitalize on the interactive opportunity. Forrester is calling their recommendations CORE -- Customer branding, Optimized technology, Responsive engagement, and Empowered staff.

Combining their thoughts with what I've seen over the past 15 years in the online strategy space working extensively with corporate marketing functions, I'm developing a full white paper and calling my recommendations MPG -- Message, Platform, and Governance. MPG, ROI, so similar, no?

Message

Fundamentally, what are we trying to communicate, and to whom?

The entire online space has exposed a major flaw in many marketing departments: there are not enough skilled resources to craft meaningful content across the many platforms that need regular care and feeding. In the old offline world, a marketing group only needed to put out brochures from time to time, and maybe assist their agency in developing TV or a print ad that would have a paragraph or two of content if that.

Now, though, someone has to create multiple web pages about each major product or service, be interesting on Facebook, respond appropriately on Twitter, write emails.... etc.

Platform

In another era, there were only a handful of platforms, most of them not requiring much from a marketing group:

• The actual production of brochures were done by a printer
• An agency took care of the TV, print, and radio media, asset creation, and distribution.
• Another agency did all aspects of direct mail.

While the marketing organization directed and coordinated all of these activities, they didn't have many true production roles.

Now there are quite a few aspects of online that require marketers to possess production skills -- web content management, email, twitter, Facebook postings, blogs, message boards.... The list is pretty long.

Governance

The Internet has forced organizations to definitively show one face to their customers, and has also made marketing and IT discover each other's worlds. These two factors have created a broad range of ownership and responsibility issues.

I'm working on blowing this out to a full white paper. Stay tuned.

Content Marketing: The Next Big Thing

Apparently this is the year of “Content”. Conferences, articles, books, white papers, entire special editions of trade rags… all about the vital role of CONTENT in the online space. And more than a few of the items read as though they were explaining the dark side of the moon. My personal favorites are the ones that start with explaining what “content” is… now, there’s some remedial content.

I’ve been working to develop sites and eCRM programs that broadly meet the needs of desired participants since 2001. Looking back on many of these efforts, it’s true that there has been a real issue with providing information that users were seeking on sites, or interested in reading in email campaigns. Target users consistently request and value in-depth information about products and services, yet marketers struggle to develop content beyond three paragraph descriptions filled with positioning statements.

How did we get to this strange place?

You’d think that the opportunity to provide strong introductory copy, good differentiating information, and increasingly detailed product facts would be just a standard practice. That’s far from the truth. Early on in the online space there was a strong desire to replicate traditional advertising and sales models in a digital manner. Consumer sites pretty rapidly formed as either “brand experiences” or eCommerce, while B2B sites were little more than well organized brochures.

Over the years I’ve had to be an evangelist for content on quite a few occasions. And true to form, evangelists can end up being martyrs, too…

In late 2005 our agency got one of the largest consumer battery brands as a client. I was assigned to lead a discovery project that would drive a full site redesign. I immediately reviewed the site analytics and fielded an online survey to discover that people actually came to the site to learn about the product – especially more specialty products like hearing aid batteries and the like. Sadly, the site was almost entirely geared at the iconic nature of their brand advertising. And the marketers couldn’t part with their advertising-centric low-interest site.

Not long after that I worked on the largest athletic drink brand. I was excited when they decided to move all of their sweepstakes registrations online as they would be gathering over a million brand loyalists emails a year! Imagine my shock when I met with the CMO to discuss the amazing CRM opportunity that this afforded… to be told that really, they didn’t have any desire to engage in an ongoing dialog with consumers because she believed they didn’t really have enough content or desire to create more.

B2B marketers haven’t been much better. Another of my clients was a large B2B eCommerce player who wanted to be seen as providing business solutions, not just product from a catalog. They were also ceasing production on an established print magazine they had done for a number of years. So it seemed like a perfect opportunity to create an eZine that would focus on the needs of their core customers and also position some of their products. The development was incredibly difficult as their site didn’t really allow for content modules and we had to go with a microsite. They had tremendous traffic and interest, yet there was a concern that it didn’t tie directly enough to commerce. Okay, okay, at least they did build and maintain the content.

Why the sudden interest then?

Four factors seem to have come together to finally push content development to the forefront:

• Proven demand – as marketers become aware of specifically how their site is being used from site analytics, they’ve come to realize that information about products / services is nearly always the top area of focus, yet rarely very engaging


• Email marketing – the desire to link email campaigns in to a broader conversation has always required content, but has not often been a fully realized opportunity


• Search engine optimization – a major spark, SEO experts have consistently lobbied for more and deeper content to improve keyword rankings


• Social marketing – ongoing interaction and dialog has both created much better understanding of customer interests, as well as heightened the need for content

Although some of these drivers are as old as the Internet, it’s the recent push to social marketing that seems to have really created the storm of interest.

My next few blogs will expand on a process to identify and develop high impact content. Watch for them!

Completed your 2010 Website Benchmark yet?

Happy New Year!

Sorry I haven’t posted in a while. 2010 ended with a BIG project helping a major small business software company rethink their online strategy.

One aspect of the discovery phase was to review their site metrics to better understand current site usage patterns. This wasn’t a months-long project so I asked to see their current quarterly or annual benchmark reports only to discover that they don’t do standard reporting of traffic, engagement patterns, content viewed, etc.

I thought that this just was the exception that proved ‘everyone does benchmark reporting’ until I had a couple of beers with an old friend who’s run digital agencies and now works for a very large digital media company. When I mentioned that I did ‘annual benchmark studies’ for a variety of clients, he was interested in what I considered standard.

So… here we go!

Why complete an annual web metrics benchmark study?

If you’ve just been told to do one, or your organization does one by rote, feel free to skip ahead. If you’re wanting or needing some great reasons to complete an annual benchmark study, read on.

From my experience, benchmark studies are completed to:

• Monitor site successes with an eye toward improving various metrics
• Identify aspects of the site that could be improved, and prioritize those improvements
• Determine how information and functionality on the site is used, and the affects of usage

What does an annual web metrics benchmark study include?

A full benchmark study includes a detailed analysis of five primary aspects of the site:

• Visits . These data elements provide top line information about initial user interaction with your site, and include:

o Daily visits – to see changes through the year and identify causes for spikes and valleys

o Page views, by day – will also show trends and spikes

• Visitors. Information about visitors shows whether we have a loyal, regular audience, or if users come periodically based on their immediate needs.

o Visitors, by day – shows peaks and valleys, may differ significantly from ‘visits’ on sites where some users may come more than once a day

o Visitor loyalty – frequency distribution to show return patterns

o Geographical distribution – most interesting for international sites, but may have relevance for US sites as well

• Sources of Traffic. A key aspect of the analysis is what seems to drive users to come… are they seeking information on a search engine? Referred from other sites? Or do they know us and type in our URL or link from an email we sent?

• Site Usage. After learning about who uses the site and why they appear to be coming, it’s important to study what they do while on the site.

o Pages viewed per visit – allows you to judge whether users are engaging with site

o Time spent on site -- also shows engagement levels

o Content areas accessed – as a summary measurement, you should determine the percentage of pages viewed for your primary content areas

o Primary pages – the top 10 or 20 pages should be analyzed in some detail to understand navigation patterns, usage patterns, bounces and exits

• Goals achieved. For an ecommerce site, goals are fairly straight-forward… sales. Examining the achievement of goals across the sales funnel provides the greatest detail, as does a study of the achievement patterns across the year. Other sites should have goals identified such as leads generated, videos viewed in full, clicks to ‘contact us’, etc.

What should we do after the benchmark?

After studying the results in depth and drawing initial conclusions, more detailed analyses of various aspects will probably be needed.

Latest Developments in Online Marketing Strategy

A former colleague who's been out of the 'web game' for a number of years asked me what the latest developments have been. I took a while to compose this email to him:

I'd say the biggest ongoing change is that the concept of managing all online touch points together seems to be firmly established and generally practiced by leading companies. They don't often use that term, nor even exactly understand that they're doing it, but there is a much greater effort to engage target consumers where they are online -- social networking sites, totally planned search paths, microsites for retailer sites, etc. Some people refer to this a 'fishing where the fish are', and are much less concerned with generating traffic to their own site.

In terms of actual sites -- they've also become much more sophisticated in thinking about 'action architecture' of their sites. When users eventually come to an actual site, what is it they want to do, and what do we want them to experience / accomplish? How do we get them down some funnel, be it purchase or lead generation? Web analytics are also much more sophisticated and widely used.

Social continues to grow, and some people believe that it may essentially eclipse email over time. That said, setting a company-specific social strategy is key as there is such a tremendous difference in engagement models between B2B organizations, B2C, etc.

Search has become much more sophisticated, from terms to target, SEO tactics, copy, and finally search landing pages and paths on sites. It's really the most scientific area of all -- marketers can very clearly see why people are coming to the site and then provide information and experiences to get them hooked in.

Mobile is big and getting bigger. As contracts are rolling over a high percentage of adults are getting smart phones. Some analysts believe that in the next couple of years smart phones will be nearly a 'given' for business professionals. This is in many ways a reverse back to more simple site experiences. You just can't serve gigantic video or flash objects to mobile devices, and mobile interfaces are a challenge primarily because of the size of the screen. This necessitates even more detailed planning of exactly what needs to be offered... getting away from gigantic pages full of flash objects and 25 links...