Improving User Experience
Creating the right user experience for your business application is the key to its success. If your customers, staff and partners do not know how to best use the application to get what they want they will at least become frustrated and at worse go elsewhere.
BSG takes a User Centred Design (UCD) approach to improving user experience, which it incorporates into its approach to creating application solutions. This requires regular end-user involvement throughout the project lifecycle. The benefit of involving users as collaborators in software design and build activities is a greater level of usability in the delivered solution. Usability is “the extent that a product can be used by specified users to achieve specified goals with effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction in a specified context of use”. Providing an easy-to-use product can result in the following tangible benefits:
Reduction in development time & cost
The user interface can account for more than 40% of the development effort for an application. The UCD approach defines user goals, usability objectives and resolves usability issues early in projects, reducing the time and cost of making changes late on in development/release to fit the solution around user retrospectively.
A particular change may typically cost 1.5 units of project resource during analysis, and can increase to 6 units during early development, 60 during systems testing and 100 units during post-release maintenance.
Increased competitive advantage
Products that are easy to use by customers, achieve differentiation in competitive marketplaces. The result is a higher level of customer satisfaction, higher percentage of repeat business and higher revenue per customer. Through this focus, we have delivered the following tangible benefits for our clients:
- Increased Customer profitability - through better selection
- Reduced customer churn - through better customer service
- Increased value for time - for sales & servicing
- Generated insight - customer behaviour, needs, requirements
- Delivered superior value - via enhanced customer experience
Improved accessibility
The nature of UCD means that differing types of users and their potential needs are identified early on. This means that the product is designed to be accessible to a wider range of users, including those with disabilities.
Improved productivity
A User Interface that allows the user to concentrate on the task in hand, as opposed to how the software works, will make the user more effective and efficient. In other words they will not be wasting time struggling with a poorly designed user interface and poorly thought out functionality behind it.
Reduction in errors
Many “human errors” can be attributed to a product with an interface that is not compatible with the user's mental model of how a task should be structured. The UCD approach understands users' expectations for task structuring and avoids the inconsistencies and ambiguities that can lead to errors.
Reduction in training time and cost
A system that had been designed around users reinforces learning and can significantly reduce training time required and its associated cost.
Reduction in support and maintenance costs
Applications that are developed for ease of use means that help-desk calls are reduced, therefore reducing the cost of the staff required to field those calls.
Up to 80% of the software lifecycle cost can occur in the maintenance phase. Of this maintenance cost, 80% can be due to unmet or unforeseen user requirements, with only 20% due to bugs or reliability problems. This cost can be reduced by investing in UCD activities in the analysis and design phases.