photo credit: baldiri

The scientist in me is always trying to measure everything, trying to find patterns and insights, trying to quantify and accurately qualify…It’s no surprise that the ROI of UX is a topic that has been on my mind for some time now. Business people understand numbers and I learned that using them in ways they understood often won me time or budget or both. I’m working on various ways to measure the effect of the UX team in organisations, mainly because it would help us not only understand its value but also clearly see any bottlenecks. I would like to speed up the UX process, but in a way that greatly minimises risk. If you speed up a process, and decide to spend less time on certain things, there is always going to be a trade-off. I’d like to be able to accurately say by what percentage we traded-off, and what the effect of that was.

Agile and UX:

There is a lot of debate at the moment on how to integrate UX in an Agile development process. I think the key to that is live site/software metrics, remote user testing, and more metrics. I think that to include UX in the Agile process, you have to also favour working software over documentation, same as in any of the other disciplines in our teams, like QA or BA for example. This means pairing with a Dev and getting things done immediately for low risk features, is preferable to drawing up wireframes. It means sketching with a pen and paper, and updating those sketches during feature meetings, with other team members and stakeholders. Draw it and hold it up for everyone to see: “This is what we’re talking about”.

If you deploy features without doing live user tests, you can still check how well they’re doing by analysing the analytics on the live site. This is why it’s so important to have sophisticated analytics, beyond Google Analytics and other free solutions. Just so we’re clear, I don’t recommend doing this for innovative solutions, but rather for things that the team already has experience with (i.e. How many highly innovative contact forms have you designed in the last 10 years?).

There will be a trade-off, but if we accurately measure how effort, time, and so on are affected, we will have an idea of how well this method worked. If we have no idea of how productive the UX team is, or what the value of their time is, we are essentially working blind.

Measures:

Before you even begin thinking about design, I think that it makes sense to agree what the ROI is for different stakeholders. It can be different for different groups involved in the project, and you might not be able to please everyone every time. Keeping tabs on which way the balance is tipping is really important.

Hard measures might be:

- Conversion / Acquisition

- Lead generation

- Retention

- Traffic

- Viral referals

- Employee productivity

- Cost savings on Dev etc…

- Decreased time to market

Soft measures might be:

- Engagement

- Customer / User satisfaction

- Brand loyalty

- Product/service adoption

- Awareness

- Ethics

- Team morale

The value of UX:

For every $ invested in UX, there is a ROI of $2 – $100.

The UI accounts for:

- 47%-66% of the total project code

- 40% of the Dev effort

- 80% of unforeseen fixes required

An equation might go something like this:

Value = (Benefit – Cost ) / Cost

This can shed some light on what the ROI is, once the cost of the team has been taken into account.

In conclusion:

If we can measure the exact ROI of UX, we can demonstrate the value of the UX team, their work and also justify the need for research when it is necessary. Often the complaint around UX is speed. We can speed up the UX process by sketching, measuring features when they are live, and evolving our designs rather than working to create a final and highly polished version at launch. We can calculate the trade-off of using this faster deployment method rather than the more traditional process of doing lots of user testing up-front. There will be times where it isn’t appropriate, and knowing the numbers allows us to justify this to the business. A caveat for the faster deployment method is that the UX team must be very senior and experienced.

I liked Dr. Susan Weinschenk’s video about the ROI of UX, enjoy!

The ROI of UX by I-Thought, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

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