How Much Effort Does It Take to Create a Great User Experience?
“The purpose of this article is to provide you with a way to measure the level of effort required to successfully complete a project in respect to user experience. This is a powerful merging of project management, user experience, requirements and best practices. And, it is simple enough for a little monkey to use. More accurately, it is simple enough for me to use.” (Source: Apogee HK, Author: John S. Rhodes)
Watch out, folks. I’ve included a formula in the article. But don’t worry, it is pretty easy to follow. And, there’s a detailed example to smooth the way.
My main point is that it is possible to figure out how hard you have to work to create a great user experience. This topic has only been loosely explored by others. The key is that you have to understand what your users face while also knowing how well your organization can meet users needs. The formula shows how to get your arms around all of this at once. Enjoy!
How Much Effort Does It Take to Create a Great User Experience?
Two other articles I’ve written for Apogee:
April 25th, 2006 at 8:41 am
Pretty good theory there, and as you say at the end, a good starting point - but some examples of actual projects would give a better idea of the range of “effort” values. I do see that the model is specific to each agency’s measurements of their own “dedication” and “clarity” so examples would need to come from one group. It would be great to have some standard values for the denominator to compare projects between companies. I’m thinking there’s a “sensitivity analysis” in there somewhere…
April 25th, 2006 at 9:04 am
My quick response is that I’ve been doing this for years in my head. I’ve only started to use the formula for real. It has been back-of-the-napkin mostly, but it has been useful. It let’s me know just how important users are to our projects while also giving me a clue about our internal UX strengths and weaknesses. I’ve also been thinking about how to use the formula to feed “real” ROI calculations, but I’m not quite there yet.