Alertbox
March 2003 productivity
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Alertbox
March 2003 productivity
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Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox, March 17, 2003:
Summary:
Usability improvements can save time-on-task, but critics argue that this is not the same as saving money. Others worry that productivity gains cause unemployment. Neither is correct: usable design saves money and saves jobs.
For many kinds of design projects, the main argument for a user-centered process is that usability improvements lead to increased productivity. This is true for intranet designs, enterprise software, call centers, transaction processing systems, factory-floor equipment, and any other design where people are paid to perform tasks with a user interface.
(For other types of design, productivity is less important, and benefits such as increased sales, improved customer satisfaction, or fewer support calls are the main arguments for usability. My report on the return on investment from usability has a detailed discussion of these issues and estimates of the expected improvements; this column focuses on productivity-driven design.)
In some cases, the connection is clear. For example, some systems are so complex that users need extensive training courses before they can become qualified operators. Industrial process control rooms are the classic example, but many administrative systems also require training. Typically, design processes that emphasize ease of learning can cut days or even weeks off the training classes. I doubt anyone would dispute that the resulting training budget savings are a direct economic gain from the usability improvements.
Productivity improvements are more difficult to assess. Consider, for example, the design of an intranet's employee directory. In our tests of employees performing tasks on a wide range of intranets in different companies, we found that the time required to find employee contact information differed dramatically:
Their main argument goes as follows: Yes, employees might save a minute or two, but they'll just spend more time at the water cooler. Just because it's faster to look up phone numbers in the employee directory, doesn't mean that people will get any more real work done.
A second counter-argument is that even if employees did do useful work during the time saved by improved usability, you cannot calculate the value of that extra work by simply multiplying the amount of time by the employee's loaded salary. Instead, you'd have to look at the specific accomplishments and value them individually.
In reality, we save a minute here, two minutes there, another minute here, and we do this over and over again. Even small time savings add up.
Consider this: You arrive at the office at 9:00 a.m. and start your first task. Let's say it takes an hour, and you start your second task at 10:00 a.m. This task also takes an hour, and at 11:00 you start the third task, which takes an hour, too. You complete it at noon, and then break for lunch.
Now, let’s say that you get a new intranet with sufficient usability improvements to let you perform each of these hour-long tasks two minutes faster. You thus complete task 1 at 9:58, and immediately start task 2, which you complete at 10:56. Finally, you complete task 3 at 11:54. You now have six minutes until your scheduled lunch break. Yes, you might decide to leave early and extend your lunch, but would you do this every day? One day, you might look at your watch, see that it's 11:54, and decide that you just have time to call an important client and resolve an open question. Or complete an expense report so that it's not looming over your head when you return from lunch. Or maybe you even decide to start on task 4, and go to lunch late that day.
Averaged over a lot of people over a lot of days, one or two minutes saved per task adds up to a substantial number of additional tasks being performed.
Companies can realize an economic value from having more tasks completed per unit of staff-time in two possible ways:
In practice, very few companies see a sharp drop in value when they move from existing high-value activities to those that are awaiting action. In reality, the value declines slowly and steadily along a curve.
Also, for a company to stay in business, the average value of an employee's work must be more than that employee's total cost. That is to say, people must produce value above their loaded salary (which includes overhead, not just take-home salary) or the company will run out of money. Thus, even though the company's next-possible activity would have slightly lower value than its current activities, its value is typically very close to that of the employee's time, since the current activities are valued higher than the employee's time.
To simplify matters, we can reasonably estimate the value of time saved based on the loaded cost of the employee's time. This might be a few percentage points off, but since it's an estimate, it's close enough for all practical purposes.
In the 1980s, usability professionals were often faced with protests from unions and other labor representatives who did not relish the prospect of participating in user tests that would result in "better" designs that would in turn get them laid off. In recent years, this has been less of a problem, initially because of the boom years, and currently because there are other sources of unemployment that worry people much more than usability. Still, in some people's minds, concerns remain.
In individual cases, some people might indeed lose their jobs because improved usability led to such high productivity that fewer employees were needed. This is unfortunate, but it is not the representative case.
Basic economics says that the lower the cost of a good, the more that good will be consumed. In the case of usability, higher productivity means lower cost per unit of work produced, because the same person can do more. This again means that more work will be required, not less.
The idea that higher productivity leads to fewer employees comes from the fixed-work hypothesis, which holds that there is a given amount of work that needs to be done in the world. This may be true in a few cases, such as directory assistance: the faster each operator handles each call, the fewer operators will be needed, because the workload is fixed by the number of people who call up to find a phone number. On the other hand, if labor costs can be reduced, the phone company might lower the price of directory assistance, and thus more people might use the service. So, even directory assistance may not be a fixed-work scenario.
In any case, most areas of the economy are certainly not fixed. If things can be done cheaper, there will be more demand. Higher productivity need not lead to unemployment.
On the contrary, unemployment is much more likely to result if we don't improve productivity substantially. Many professional jobs are currently at risk of being relocated from high-salary countries, such as the United States, Europe, Japan, and Australia, to cheaper areas. The Internet creates the death of distance and the easy availability of people who are just as smart as people in expensive countries, but make 10% of their salary.
Increased productivity is the only way for high-salary countries to keep their jobs. Thus, usability professionals should not worry that they create unemployment when they improve a design and increase users' productivity. On the contrary, such efforts are exactly what's needed to keep us all in business.