It’s Not Just Usability
Joel On Software — “UI consultants are constantly on the defensive, working up improbable ROI formulas about the return on investment clients will get from their $75,000 usability project, precisely because usability is perceived as “optional,” and the scary thing is, in a lot of cases, it is. In a lot of cases. The CNN website has nothing to be gained from a usability consultant. I’ll go out on a limb and say that there is not a single content-based website online that would gain even one dollar in revenue by improving usability, because content-based websites (by which I mean, websites that are not also applications) are already so damn usable.”
p.s. This is exactly the reason why I wrote Profits First, Users Second. (However, Joel talks about what he thinks comes after usability, namely the social interface. That’s what his article is really about.)