The Greater Dayton IT Alliance and Technology First present “This Product Sucks: Business Impacts of Usability Breakdowns” by Darren Kall, Senior Director of Global Experience Design for LexisNexis, and Rob Keefer, Principal Consultant and Agile Development Center Director at Strategic Data Systems.

In the rush to deliver speed-to-market, IT offerings often proceed at the expense of usability and user experience (UX). How does this impact results?

• Convoluted e-commerce sites can lose up to half of their potential sales if customers can’t find merchandise, according to Forrester Research, Inc.
• Improving the customer experience increases buyers by 40% and increases order size by 10%. (Creative Good, 2000)
• As a result of usability improvements at AT&T, the company saved $2,500,000 in training expenses
• A major computer company spent $20,700 on usability work to improve the sign-on procedure in a system used by several thousand people. The resulting productivity improvement saved the company $41,700 the first day the system was used. On a system used by over 100,000 people, for a usability outlay of $68,000, the same company recognized a benefit of $6,800,000 within the first year of the system’s implementation. This is a cost-benefit ratio of $1:$100

In this economy everyone wants to get the edge on competition and make informed development investments. With results like these how can you afford NOT to take another look at your product UX?

In this talk, we explore product user experience from two unique perspectives: UX expert and Lead Architect

• Why do I need to be concerned about my product UX?
• What is the business value/ROI of a UX focus?
• How does a focus on UX reduce development costs?
• How will a UX focus reduce my time to market and increase revenue?
• How do I begin to develop a focus on UX?

See gdita.org for more information.

UX in Dayton enjoys a strong connection to the Human Factors Engineering tradition, with the field having started at Wright Patterson AFB in WWII with Paul Fitts and Alphonse Chapanis. The USAF Human Effectiveness Directorate continues today as the direct heritage of the origination of the field, located here at Wright-Patterson AFB, one of the largest US military research centers. Dayton is the site of the first HFES local chapter of Southwest Ohio, started in 1957. The evolution of HF here has also resulted in Dayton’s active community of practice in Cognitive Engineering, a field well-represented by the growing decision and cognitive engineering consultancy Klein Associates.

Dayton was an early center for invention, with the Wright Brothers, then Delco Labs and NCR having grown from inventive work. LexisNexis and Reynolds were early innovators in user interface design in the late 80’s. User Experience has been a necessary partner in the growth of high-tech, with LexisNexis and Elsevier having developed world-class UX capabilities. From a UX employment, the Southwest Ohio region has never been a major interactive agency, advertising firm, or marketing consultancy area. Cincinnati’s world-class marketing/design firms notwithstanding, this region has a history of technology invention and industrial design. As a world-leading technology region, a strong heritage of invention has led to significant advances in large-scale industrial and military systems, and product design.