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Usability Evangelism: Beneficial or Land Grab? By Jakob Nielsen, Ph.D.

If you are a usability manager, is it ethical for you to push hard for bigger usability budgets? Or is "user evangelism" just a euphemism for grabbing more resources for your own group?

Sure, you may entertain dreams of becoming the Director of Usability or the VP of User Experience, but I still think it's appropriate for usability managers to evangelize usability. Usability has astoundingly high return-on-investment (ROI) for Web sites, very high ROI for intranets, and quite high ROI for software products. It doesn't even matter how high your particular ROI is: you are still doing the shareholders a favor by getting the company to invest more of its money in usability.

Similarly, if you work in a government agency, taxpayers will love you for allocating more of their tax dollars to usability. The experience from the few government intranets with good usability show that big agencies can save millions of dollars per year by improving the productivity of civil servants.

Obviously, at some point there will be diminishing returns from additional investments in usability, but we are currently so far from that point that it's not worth pondering. Usability is still a young discipline and no companies are investing so heavily in it that they are over-spending. My personal guess is that optimal resource allocation will require spending at least 50 percent of a project's budget on usability. In the future, optimal usability expenditures may be even bigger, as standardized components and offshore design and implementation make it ever cheaper to build whatever your usability findings dictate.

Currently, best-practice organizations only spend 10 percent on usability, so any increased spending will remain comfortably inside the territory of stupendous profitability for many years to come.

Balancing usability with other priorities

It almost goes without saying that there are many other priorities in any design project besides usability, from marketing and sales objectives to engineering considerations and the realities of limited budgets and finite development time.

Often, design approaches that would vastly improve the user experience have to be rejected because they would delay launch unacceptably or undermine the project's business objectives. For example, advertising is almost always bad for usability, and yet some sites live from selling ads to gullible marketers who haven't yet discovered the poor returns from display ads on the Web. For such sites, the findings from a usability study would surely indicate that the ads should be cut, and yet this will not be done.

In such cases what should the usability folks do? Shut up and salute? Or fight a losing battle?

I say fight on, but recognize the need for compromise. The most sacred duty of a usability specialist is to report the truth about user behavior. You can't hide your findings just because they're unpopular with stakeholders from other interests. Even though the user experience will have to be compromised, the truth shouldn't be.

Ultimately, the project manager will make the tough calls to balance out the users' needs with the company's needs. He or she can only do so if the users' needs are known.

If you hide data or neglect to advocate the users' interests, then the project manager won't know how much a given design decision will hurt long-term customer relationships. Often, it's possible to arrive at a compromise between the different interests and create a design that hurts users less than the original proposal.

Consider, for example, a Web site that depends on advertising. In testing many such sites, we've found that users detest certain types of ads, whereas others are much less annoying. Sites that run the worst ads are severely underlining their own brand, and so knowing what ads bother users most will allow you to formulate an advertising policy that avoids the worst of the worst.

And finally, there's one more reason to be a forceful usability evangelist: Customers are the only stakeholders who are not represented in design meetings. You'll be sure to hear protests in a meeting if a design idea steps on the art director's pet creative ideas, if it contradicts the current marketing slogan, or if engineering thinks it's going to be difficult to build.

But if it hurts users and will cause customers to leave? Silence. Unless you speak up. So do it.

About the author

Jakob Nielsen, Ph.D. is a principal of Nielsen Norman Group. He is the founder of the "discount usability engineering" movement, which emphasizes fast and efficient methods for improving the quality of user interfaces. Nielsen, noted as "the leading expert on Web usability" by U.S. News and World Report and "the next best thing to a true time machine" by USA Today, is the author of the best-selling book Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity, which has sold more than a quarter of a million copies in 22 languages. His other books include Usability Engineering, Usability Inspection Methods, International User Interfaces, Homepage Usability: 50 Websites Deconstructed, and Prioritizing Web Usability. Nielsen's Alertbox column on Web usability has been published on the Internet since 1995 and currently has about 200,000 readers. From 1994 to 1998, Nielsen was a Sun Microsystems Distinguished Engineer. His previous affiliations include Bell Communications Research, the Technical University of Denmark, and the IBM User Interface Institute. He holds 79 United States patents, mainly on ways of making the Internet easier to use.

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