Learn techniques for estimating the cost of usability activities and measuring improvements based on hundreds of development projects and 72 case studies. We present techniques for converting usage metrics into business gains for different industries (e.g., intranets, e-commerce, marketing, software, and electronics and hardware products).

This 212-page report includes 131 screenshots of before and after designs, and discussions of design elements that increase business metrics.

Benefits

• 72 case studies depicting design improvements resulting in increases in key performance indicators, ranging from 0% to over 6,000% improvement
• 131 screenshots of before and after designs, and the associated metrics
• Reasons why some sites didn't get better and one site got more than 65 times better
• Mathematical formula for computing the usability effort required for successful design projects

Topics

• Executive summary
  • Cost of usability
  • Benefits from usability
  • Estimating return on investment (ROI)
• Cost of usability
  • Survey of best practices
  • Detailed regression model for usability budgets
  • Differences between the United States, Europe, and Australia
  • Evolution in usability budgets
  • Future trends
• Benefits of usability
  • Sources of gains from usability
  • Estimating the magnitude of gains from usable design
  • Computing improvement scores
  • Expected usability improvements
  • Comparison with usability metrics from traditional development projects
  • Various classes of web usability metrics
  • Change in ROI metrics over time
• Case studies of usability metrics from real design projects
  • How case studies were collected
  • Anonymous case studies
• Case Studies by metrics category
  • Sales and conversion rates
    • 22 case studies
  • Traffic and visitor numbers
    • 14 case studies
  • Feature use
    • 18 case studies
  • User performance
    • 17 case studies
  • Development time

Download report excerpt (2MB PDF)

What’s new in the 4th Edition?

The 4th edition contains additional examples. The main points made across the editions are the same.