Additional Resources
Listed below are some additional resources on usability and return on investment. We welcome your feedback for additions to this list. You can find more usability resources by visiting our Books on Usability page.
- John S. Rhodes wrote a column for Webboard.com that is a comprehensive and well-laid out marketing summary for how usability testing is actually cost-effective: Usability Can Save Your Company.
- Randolph G. Bias (ed. Deborah Mayhew) wrote one of the most widely read books on the cost/benefit analysis of usability testing called, Cost-Justifying Usability.
- As a corollary to cost-justifying usability to the financial decision makers, editors Leslie Trenner and Joanna Bawa compiled, The Politics of Usability: A Practical Guide to Designing Usable Systems in Industry.
- Thomas K. Landauer’s, The Trouble with Computers: Usefulness, Usability and Productivity (1995) remains an excellent source for facts and figures about the gap between what computers promised to afford and the reality.
- Jakob Nielson co-authored Homepage Usability: 50 Websites Deconstructed with Marie Tahir, arguing that home pages are the the most important presence on the Web, and supporting that argument with specific observations and suggestions backed with solid quantitative analysis.
- Written by Janice James and Carol Righi and published in 2007, User-Centered Design Stories: Real-World UCD Case Studies puts the reader in the middle of real-life usability dilemmas.
- Usability Success Stories: How Organizations Improve by Making Easier-to-use Software And Web Sites, by Paul Sherman, provides valuable proof that usability improves a business’s ROI.
- John Rhodes promises to help readers “sneak usability into any organization” with his book Selling Usability: User Experience Infiltration Tactics.
- The Nielson Norman Group Report Usability Return on Investment, Third Edition documents current best practices in employing usability methods in Web design projects with respect to two issues: cost of usability activities, and expected improvements in measured usability.
- Thomas Tullis and Bill Albert co-authored Measuring the User Experience: Collecting, Analyzing, and Presenting Usability Metrics, which provides detailed instructions on how to measure improved usability for the web, web-based applications, and electronic products of all kinds, without breaking the bank.
- “Usability is Good Business,” a whitepaper prepared by Donahue, Nowicki, and Weinschenk in 1999, discusses the cost-effectiveness of usability engineering and performing usability cost-benefit analyses in order to acquaint software professionals and other interested parties with these topics.
- A post from Jakob Nielson’s Alertbox on useit.com in Feburary 2007: Do Government Agencies and Non-Profits Get ROI From Usability?
- Co-authored by Karen Donahue and Michael Schrage, Built for Use: Driving Profitability Through the User Experience targets business managers.
- Aaron Marcus’s white paper, Return on Investment (ROI) for Usability. Version: April 2004, illustrates the reasons for getting on board with usability.
- Compiled by Info.Design, Inc., Usability Performance Stats is another valuable resource for examples of how usability improves ROI.