3. Making the Business Case

“Drive thy business; let not that drive thee.”

—Benjamin Franklin

Topics Covered in This Chapter

Gaps Between Stakeholders Developing a Business Case Framework The Benefits of Good Design The Case for Profitability Proving ROI The Usability Engineering Life Cycle

In the days of the Internet revolution from the mid to late 1990s and early 2000s, any company related to the Internet—or computing in general—was considered gold. Indeed, many companies without a comprehensive business plan received funding because they were involved with the Internet.

Those days are long gone. Although the go-go days are over, what’s been left in its wake is a more mature realization about what’s needed to survive. You need all the help you can get to beat the competition. And, as always, customer satisfaction is the key to survival and growth.

This is why usability analysis is so important—it lets you understand how your users react to your user interface so you learn what’s wrong and what’s right in your user interface design, as well as any other peripheral materials that ship with your product, such as the documentation. Usability analysis includes early customer involvement to gauge their reaction to and productivity with an interface. This feedback gives you the opportunity to make changes before you release your product to your customers, which can result in more satisfied customers.

User interface design, usability design, and usability testing are all strongly linked. Without good user interface design, users won’t like your product, whether it’s a software product, hardware product, or Web site. Without usability design and testing, you’ll never know if your design is useful until you receive input from the public. If your user interface is a flop, you and your project team will have to spend time, money, and effort fixing problems that could have been fixed during the development process, not to mention that the product team will have to endure customer service headaches.

To show the benefits of good interface and usability design to your stakeholders, you need to make a strong business case. The business case not only explains design benefits to company stakeholders, but also how the company benefits from the investment, called return on investment or ROI.

The first step is to identify and understand not only the users’ goals, but also the goals of the various stakeholders in your company. Then you need to create an overall plan for your project to present to your stakeholders so you can get your plan approved. The plan should not only address the benefits from good design, but the plan should also discuss who in the company benefits from good design. As part of that discussion, you should make the case for profitability. Finally, you should make an ROI study that shows just how much money you expect will be made from the investment based on reasonable estimates of time and money.