The monetary value
Usability and a good user experience are signs of quality. Products which are perceived as having higher quality bring numerous advantages.
Increased sales and gained productivity
Translating usability improvements into monetary value is easy for e-commerce sites where increased sales result in immediate value. Regarding intranets the ROI can be easily calculated in terms of gained productivity by multiplying the time saved by the hourly rate of the employees.
Consider a simple example we recently encountered in a large Intranet project used by 40,000 employees: the daily lunch menu was hidden behind 3 clicks and only available as a PDF document which took the average user 20 seconds to download and open. Reducing this time by 50% to 10 seconds saves the company approximately 7 man years annually, assuming that only half the employees visit the menu on a daily basis. This is one single change with an enormous impact.
The more visitors, the bigger the return on investment
The more visitors there are to your web site, the bigger your return on investment will be, whether this return is measured in increased sales or gains in productivity.
Higher brand loyalty and less price competition
Improvements which are harder to calculate include increased customer satisfaction or optimised use of desired customer activities such as subscription to a newsletter. However, a site with a good user experience and a strong brand is perceived as more trustworthy which will lead to increased customer loyalty, and retaining an existing customer is several times cheaper than the acquisition of a new one. Having a trusted brand also reduces the need to engage in price wars.
