Dan Rosenberg, Vice President: Usability and Interface Design

1. Georgia Tech GVU Double Header24/7 or Bust: Designing for the Challenges of Global UCD&7 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 world’s 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 Q & Q U E S T I O N S A N S W E R S 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 won’t 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 else’s revenue/employment opportunity!

22. Myth #3:You 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 can’t 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 don’t know what they are looking for.

24. Myth #5:All 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 • Can’t 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! & &