Cost Justification
Randolph G. Bias

1. Justification, of cost justification
   • Versus what? The "old way" - dependence on the inspiration of the stake-holders
   • The empirical approach to user-centered design
   • To whom do benefits accrue?
     • The development team
     • Customer support
     • Documentation
     • Training
     • The customer
2. Quantifying the costs (easy!)
   • In-house usability teams
   • Usability engineering consultants/vendors
   • Recognizing that there will be SOME costs, with or without usability engineering
3. Quantifying the benefits (harder)
   • Estimates
     • Based on historical data
     • Based on usability testing
     • Based on sales projections
     • Engaging the customer in the estimating
   • Actuals
     • Gathering the data
     • Getting buy-in from the various groups
     • Demonstrating the return-on-investment
4. The value of money - various methods of cost justification
   • Raw dollars
   • Payback period
   • Net present value
   • Internal rate of return
5. Not "if," but "which" - using a cost-justification approach NOT to justify (or not) usability engineering of a human-computer interface, but to steer the product development team toward a PARTICULAR SET of usability engineering methods
   • The field of usability engineering has come to a point of sophistication where we needn't ask the question "Shall we employ usability engineering"?, but rather we should ask "Which methods will yield us the best return-on-investment for our usability engineering dollar and hour"?
   • Here we will present screen shots from a spreadsheet, with macros, that can be used as a model for the reader to build a cost-justification tool.
6. Why a cost-justification approach is MORE important for web interfaces
7. Special issues
   • What of the not-for-sale internal-use software or web site?
   • Actual value vs. perceived value
   • Are we worried about achieving a particular level of confidence, or about avoiding a disaster (and a law suit)?
   • The "developers are users" inhibitor - how shall we learn NOT to depend on our own intuitions?
   • Finding the stake-holder where the cost and benefit lines cross - what to do when the costs outweigh the benefits for a particular sub-organization