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Usability return on investment (ROI) in the research literature

"Sun Microsystems has shown how spending about $20,000 could yield a savings of $152 million dollars. Each and every dollar invested could return $7,500 in savings." (Rhodes, 2000)

"One airline's IFE (In-flight Entertainment System) was so frustrating for the flight attendants to use that many of them were bidding to fly shorter, local [less desirable] routes to avoid having to learn and use the difficult systems. For flight attendants to bid for flights from Denver to Dallas just to avoid the IFE indicated a serious morale problem." (Cooper, 1999)

"A financial services company had to scrap an application it had developed when, shortly before implementation, developers doing a User Acceptance test found a fatal flaw in their assumptions about how data would be entered. By this time it was too late to change the underlying structure." (Dray, 1995)

The Standish Group reported that American Airlines sued Budget Rent-A-Car, Marriott Corporation and Hilton Hotels after the failure of a $165m car rental and hotel reservation system project. Among the major causes of the project's disintegration were "an incomplete statement of requirements, lack of user involvement, and constant changing of requirements and specifications". (Standish, 1995)

“Systems design with usability engineering has typically reduced the time needed for training by around 25%.” (Landauer, 1995, The Trouble With Computers)

"The average UI has some 40 flaws. Correcting the easiest 20 of these yields an average improvement in usability of 50%. The big win, however, occurs when usability is factored in from the beginning. This can yield efficiency improvements of over 700%." (Landauer, 1995, The Trouble With Computers)

“User-centred design typically cuts errors in user-system interaction from 5 percent down to 1 percent.” (Landauer, 1995, he Trouble With Computers)

"Wixon & Jones did a case study of a usability-engineered software product that increased revenue by more than 80% over the first release of the product (built without usability work). The revenues of the usability-enhanced system were 60% higher than projected. Many customers cited usability as a key factor in buying the new system." (Bias & Mayhew, 1994)

"By correcting usability problems in the design phase, American Airlines reduced the cost of [...] fixes by 60-90%." (Bias & Mayhew, 1994)

“80% of all software development costs occur after the product has been released. [...] Of these, 80% are due to unforeseen or un-addressed user requirements – only 20% are related to bugs and reliability problems.” (Karat, 1993)

“Around 63% of software projects exceed their cost estimates. The top four reasons for this are frequent requests for changes from users, overlooked tasks, user's lack of understanding of their own requirements, insufficient user-analyst communication and understanding.” (Lederer, A L & Prasad, J (1992) Nine Management Guidelines for Better Cost Estimating. Communications of the ACM).

"One study found that 80% of suftware life-cycle costs occur during the maintenance phase. Most maintenance costs are associated with 'unmnet or unforseen' user requirements and other usability problems." (Pressman, 1992)

Read quotes from the press in the companion page to this one.
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