Alan, I don't know about your clients, but mine have finite budgets. :-)
Call it ROI, or call it something else, but they still need to figure
out where to draw the line on UI spending. Certain features (pages,
widgets, points of interaction, etc.) are worth building, to get the
user experience up to a minimum quality -- and the rest just aren't
going to be worth it.
I'm not going to tell the one-person craft business that she needs to
spend $10,000 on an ecommerce site redesign if it's not going to earn
her that much in extra business (even though the current site
experience is mediocre). That's an ROI calculation by my definition.
And maybe that assessment doesn't lead to new business for me or any
other UX folk, but I have to be honest with my clients.
Am I misunderstanding you? My apologies for not having the full
context of your remarks; I was unable to go to Savannah this week, so
I didn't hear your keynote. (Sigh.)
- Jenifer
On 2/10/08, Alan Cooper <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Will,
>
> It's unclear to me that there is an advantage to describing our value
> in terms of ROI, which is, after all, an industrial age term used to
> describe the advantages of upgrading one's industrial processes. It is
> not necessarily a useful metric for measuring post-industrial business
> success. ROI measures efficiency and, as Peter Drucker points out,
> efficiency is no longer a very effective measurement of the success of a
> business.
>
> I'm sure that it is possible to gather up a sufficiency of numbers (we
> have nothing if not a sufficiency of numbers) to generate a claim for
> "ROI", but then it exposes our work to attack and deconstruction on that
> same basis. Maybe that's not such a good bargain.
>
> In software, there is simply no reliable relationship between what you
> spend on building it and what value you get. The appropriate measure is
> quality out, not investment in.
>
> Thanx,
> Alan
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of
> Will Evans
> Sent: Saturday, February 09, 2008 9:31 PM
> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Subject: Re: [IxDA Discuss] Thoughts on Alan Cooper's Keynote
>
> To Paraphrase Alan "First to market is NOT best to market - business
> managers only know first to market." He also touched upon the idea
> that business managers understand the metric of "first to market"
> but have no means of measuring ROI for design - which is why our jobs
> are so tough. If Alan read our list here - he would have seen our
> discussion about this and might have even read my reference to the
> Adaptive Path report on ROI of User Experience. I wish he had read
> that!
>
>
> . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
> Posted from the new ixda.org
> http://www.ixda.org/discuss?post=25686
>
>
> ________________________________________________________________
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--
---------------------------------------
Jenifer Tidwell
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://designinginterfaces.com
http://jtidwell.net
________________________________________________________________
*Come to IxDA Interaction08 | Savannah*
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Register today: http://interaction08.ixda.org/
________________________________________________________________
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