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User experience is the science and art of designing a product like a website or a software application so that it's easy to use. So that it fits the expectation that the user has for it, and so that it meets business goals.
There's a whole methodology around designing a user experience, and sometimes people ask me is it worth it to do all that work to design a user experience?
So let's talk about the return on investment, or ROI, of doing user experience work.
IEEE is a professional organization that puts out reports and does research for programmers, developers, and engineers, and they put out an article called "Why Software Fails".
Here's some interesting data from that article.
They estimate that the amount of money that is spent worldwide in information technology is estimated at one trillion dollars a year. The percent of projects that are abandoned because they are hopelessly inadequate is up to 15 percent of all projects.
The percent of revenue that goes to the IT group is five percent of a company's total revenue and up to ten percent if it's a financial or telecommunications company.
The amount of time that programmers spend on rework that is actually avoidable is 50 percent of their time.
The cost of fixing an error after development is 100 times that of fixing an error before development of the project is completed.
Of the top 12 reasons that projects fail, three of the top 12 are directly related to what we would call user experience or user-centered design work, and those three are badly defined requirements; poor communication among customers, developers, and users; and stakeholder politics.
So the kind of work that, that user experience professionals give, stakeholder interviews, user research, user testing, user centered design.
These are all things that can fix at least three of those 12 reasons why software fails.
You actually can calculate the savings or additional revenue or benefit that you get from approving your user experience in the product.
Robert
