Assumptions for Productivity Calculation

(Sidebar to Jakob Nielsen's column on intranet portals)

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Let's make the following assumptions:

• all employees spend 5 seconds more than necessary to ponder the headline because it is not sufficiently communicative
• the poorly written headline causes 10% of employees to click on the headline even though the story is useless to them
• people spend 30 seconds on average reading the story before they decide to back out because it's useless
• the company has 10,000 employees using the intranet
• the value of an employee's time is $50/hour (note that the value of an employee's time should be much more than their salary; not just to account for benefits and overhead but also to contribute to the company's bottom line)

See also 110-page report on the return on investment (ROI) for usability.