Georgia Tech GVU Double Header 247 or Bust: Designing for the Challenges of Global UCD

1
Georgia Tech GVU Double Header24/7 or Bust
Designing for the Challenges of Global UCD7
Myths of Usability ROI
Dan Rosenberg, Vice President Usability and
Interface Design
Oracle Corporation
2
Organization Structure
3
Challenges of Oracle UCD
4
Oracle UI Examples

• Simple examples become very complex problem when
  done on a global scale
• How to represent all the worlds tax laws in a
  single UI ?
• How to describe every address on earth in a
  single UI ?
• Examples
• Tax Definition calculating, billing, collecting
  and reporting taxes on products your company
  builds or sells
• Customer Information a data model for creating
  and maintaining customer information
• These two interact and require exact data for
  legal reasons
• End user is everyone
• Administrative user is business not technical
  specialist
• Setup and configuration errors are fatal

5
InvoiceSample
6
Etax Setup Legal Boundaries
Where is company?
Where is inventory?
7
Etax Setup Tax Definition
Whose law is in effect for any given transaction?
8
Etax Setup Effective Dates
How long is the law valid for?
9
InvoiceSample
10
TCA Mixed Global Addresses
Many countries, different formats
11
Create an Address
Standard US address format
12
In Another Country
But company is in Japan
13
Structured Data is Different
Same database but different format of structured
data.
14
Some Lessons Learned

• Requirements gathering need to know more than
  just who the user is.
• Rules laws that impact objects/tasks
• New financial laws limit what certain user can do
• UI design maximize technology that supports
  global UI for different countries
• List of values control instead of traditional GUI
  drop down for more flexible format searching
• Progressive disclosure of country based formats
• The experience make the complexity transparent
  and seamless to user

15
End of Part 1
A
16
Topic 2 7 Myths of Usability ROI
17
Key Questions

• Why are we still talking about this (CHI, UPA,
  etc.)?
• I have never been asked for an ROI justification
  at a software company
• Why is that?
• Inadequacy of current Usability ROI models
• Where do these numbers come from?
• Are they real?
• Why wont your CEO believe them?
• Is there a more strategic approach?
• Where should we be looking to measure our success?

18
Conventional Usability ROI theory

• Good usability increases
• Sales Market Share
• Customer satisfaction
• Profitability
• Poor Usability leads to
• Higher training costs
• Higher support costs
• Longer schedules
• Proposes various formula to quantify and case
  studies to justify these

19
Where do the ROI numbers come from?

• Consultants looking to convince clients of their
  fee structure
• Google search on Usability ROI led to
• 96 different HF/UE consulting firms websites
• 40 citations on one book (Cost Justifying
  Usability)
• 100 references to Debra Mayhew
• Small set of published studies
• Cited repeatedly (by each other)
• Most are ambiguous with incomplete data
• Did not document related business variables

20
Myth 1Generalization is valid

• Without user centered design, a user
  interface typically has around 40 flaws that can
  slow users and lead to errors
• Landauer (1995) The trouble with computers.
  MIT Press.
• Is this Hardware or Software?
• Is this Web Store front, a packaged application
  or an internal IT project?

21
Myth 2 Calculation of ROI cost from the
producer perspective

• Research by Gartner Group reveals that in
  corporate practice, the average annual bill for
  supporting a single PC is 13000.
• Gibbs, Taking Computers to Task (1997)
  Scientific American.
• Not good for the customer
• Extra support cost is someone elses
  revenue/employment opportunity!

22
Myth 3You can ignore the other factors

• Revenues for one DEC product that was
  developed using UCD techniques increased 80 for
  the new version and usability was cited as the
  second most significant improvement.
• Wixon Jones (1995) Usability for fun and
  profit.
• What was the number 1 reason? Doubling the size
  of the sales force, increasing their commission?
  Reducing the price of the product 75?

23
Myth 4Analog Comparisons are not required

• Cost of bad web design Loss of approximately
  50 of potential sales from the site as people
  cant find stuff
• Jakob Nielsen (1998) Alert box (cited by
  Forrester)
• Compared to what?
• Do you buy something in 50 of the brick and
  mortar stores you go into when shopping?
• Can you find a part at Home Depot 50 of the
  time?
• People often dont know what they are looking for.

24
Myth 5All usability are spent effectively

• Creative Good offered the striking
  revelation that a dollar spent on advertising
  during the 1998 holiday season produced 5 in
  total revenue, while a dollar spent on customer
  experience improvements yielded more than 60
• M. Rauterburg, website (2003)
• Assumes a level of effectiveness that does not
  generally exist in the profession

25
Myth 6Executives will believe voodoo economics

• There are 1 billion users on the internet and
  half of them could come to your site. If the
  average cost of an abandoned shopping cart is 20
  you will lose 10 billion a year in sales of your
  designer pet food
• Rosenberg (2003) Parody of J. Nielsen
• Will get you coverage in NewsWeek, etc.
• Will then be cited as fact by Gartner and
  Forrester Research groups

26
Myth 7 UE resources will reduce schedule

• 15 week project becomes an 11 week project
• With a 13,000 investment in UE
• Overall project costs are reduced by 8,000
• Total time on the project is reduced by 4 weeks
• Friedland and Innes (2003) UPA workshop
• Software schedules are immutable!
• Most software engineering is evolutionary today
• Schedule ends when you run out of time, money or
  features

27
Laws of gravity affecting usability ROI

• Cheaper to fix problems early in the design
  process
• Automation reduces complexity faster and in
  larger increments than UI design can
• Globalization reduces labor costs

28
Replace the Myths

• Stop looking in the mirror
• Start looking out the window
• Define usability value by contribution to
• Your customers success (TCO)
• Not the producers ROI

29
External Customers cost

• Total cost of ownership (TCO)
• Implementation
• System administration
• Deployment and consulting implementations
• Operational Productivity
• Labor costs to perform service transactions
• Time to manufacture product
• Utilization of customer resources

30
Internal Sales team

• Not the sales numbers
• Cant correlate with a single factor like
  usability
• The sales force
• Win/Loss reports
• Provide CIF data during sales cycle
• Analyst and Press reports

31
Internal Support team

• To get faster answers to customer
• Web UI with knowledge base
• To maximize customer uptime
• Remote maintenance
• Hosting
• Reduce customers training costs

32
The business product ecosystem

• Good product design (features, performance, cost,
  reliability and usability)
• Good execution (manufacturing, distribution,
  sales and marketing)
• Enough profit to stay in business because you
  have successful customers that can pay you

33
Rosenbergs practical rule of software product
ROI relevance

• 10 of the worlds software generates 90 of
  the software industry revenue
• therefore
• If your product is not in that 10 there is no
  return.
• To be in the profitable 10 usability is
  necessary but not sufficient.

34
QUESTIONS ANSWERS DEBATE!