7 reasons why you can’t sell usability, and what to do about it

Selling usability services has been on my mind quite a bit lately, and in that respect I’m not alone.  Several other usability practitioners have discussed selling usability or UX.  Some of them include Alan Colville, who recently posted an excellent article on selling UX to large companies, Kate Walser and her wonderful UX in the Boardroom article, and even the very useful book Selling Usability by John S. Rhodes.

All of these practitioners and more discuss the problems inherent in explaining usability and UX services to companies that are prospects for potential services.

So why then is selling usability so difficult?  In my opinion, it;s quite simple;

“They won’t buy usability if they don’t know what it is.”

The problem of selling usability:

The problem with selling usability has nothing to do with you and how you pitch your usability services, or your advertising approach, your marketing materials, prospect lists or the copy you create to sell.  The problem is;

“The audience is completely un-receptive to ANY sales message, because the service is not understood.”

Educate first, sell second:

The best method for you to use for selling usability is to not sell it at all.  Instead, work toward educating prospects first about:

• What usability is (and what it isn’t)
• Why usability is helpful / necessary
• How to easily fit usability into the Software Development Life Cycle

After educating prospects about usability, and touching on the benefits usability can bring to your prospect then you can start selling usability.

If dealing with a prospect who either doesn’t know about usability, or is misinformed about how it works, you must know who you are talking to.  You must understand and deal with the reason or reasons for their lack in interest about usability.  Properly educating prospective clients is the best way to sell usability.

Here’s my top 7 reasons why selling usability is so difficult, and what to do about it, I hope you find these useful (note, scroll to the bottom of the page for a handy list of selling usability references used in this article):

#1 – Usability is not understood by senior management:

In many organizations, both large and small, usability is not part of the process for development because senior management has no clue what usability is.  Why should they?  Usability is not typically part of traditional business administration or technology training.

Also, senior management, especially technology leaders, are not compensated for usability or user satisfaction of the applications they build.  They are only compensated for how well they complete projects on-time, on-budget and on-target to requirements and specifications. At mid-sized and small companies this impact is even greater.

Solution – Target usability education at senior management levels:

When usability is not understood at all in a company, I’ve found the best way is to start education at the top, speaking the language of executives in terms of ROI.  Providing education and information about how usability contributes to improvements in application speed, reduction in errors, or increases in revenue uses the terms executives understand, and are compensated for.  Human Factors International does a good job of providing calculators for ROI that executives will understand.

#2 – Just say “no”ds

A very wise former supervisor of mine once told me that he observed that people that moved up the corporate ladder and stayed there were excellent at saying “no.”

His opinion was that by saying “no” to trying anything new, saying “no” to changing the old routine, and saying “no” to unknown results these managers could safely continue to exist in their organizations.

Perhaps you’ve run across a “no” man from time to time.

Solution – Go over, around or under those that say “no”

It’s unlikely you’ll ever get a true “no” manager to say “yes.”  You can try, using education about how usability will actually enable the manager’s goals to be hit easier, quicker and with better certainty.

There’s even an excellent book on how to deal with Getting Past “No” which you may find useful. However this is a long shot.  “No”  just comes naturally to these types of managers.

You may have to simply cut the “no” manager out of the equation if all else fails.  If necessary, focus on someone either above, or to the side of that person (equal to, but in a different department for example).  I’m not advocating not trying; rather I’m advocating spending your limited resources where the greatest good has the potential of occurring.

#3 – Usability doesn’t add to revenue

I once tried to sell usability testing to a small firm that produces applications on behalf of large businesses.  However, this firm was very resistant to my usability testing.  Why?  Because they were paid to generate code according to the requirements provided by their clients (who knew nothing about usability) and usability didn’t add to their revenue.

Adding usability testing to the development process would have cost this little company money, money they hadn’t budgeted for and weren’t going to get back from their client.  Worse, it might result in potentially needing to change the requirements, which would cause client issues and potential release delays, and thus more money.  Far from being a revenue generator, usability was considered an unnecessary and potentially dangerous expense.  How sad.

Solutions – Speak revenue in terms each type of prospect understands

For developer companies that build apps for 3^rd parties, they could bundle usability as a component of their services, and either add a new revenue stream because they charge their clients for it, or differentiate their services from competitors by offering usability testing as part of the development package (to provide an even better application).

For marketing and sales types, pointing to the usability success of the $300 million button and related success stories of eCommerce gains would be a great usability revenue generation education tool.

For applications developers / owners, the ability to sell more units, based on improved interface performance would be useful.

The Nielsen Norman Group produced a helpful ROI of Usability study that provides plenty of rationale for usability’s return on investment.  All would be excellent ways to drive home the point that usability can indeed add to revenue.

#4 – Usability will slow development down

I hear this concern about usability slowing development down mostly from technology teams.  The thinking is; “We already have our requirements and specifications, so UI issues are already decided.  There’s no time to test usability, testing will slow us down and add no value.”

The real issue here is the technology team is probably acting in a reactive manner, and simply building code based on requirements received.  They may have no power, or no desire, to rock the interface boat based on usability testing results, they may not own the requirements.  Thus there’s “no time” to usability test.

Solution – Educate the requirements owners about usability

The solution in this case is to find and educate the people responsible for drafting and approving the requirements, which may not be the technology team.  Mention how usability can be added to early stage development (paper prototype stage or wireframes) with minimal time impact, and maximum effectiveness.  Tout the ability of early testing to optimize UI design decisions, so that the requirements can be written and or revised with better UI information.

#5 – Usability is focus groups which are already done (or not needed)

This argument comes mostly from companies that have marketing research departments or leaders, who assume usability is just a form of market research.  The issue here is lack of education about the methodology and purpose of usability testing.

Solution – Educate about the differences between focus groups and usability testing

Here’s where you must clearly define that usability testing is not about gathering opinions about designs (aka market research and focus groups), it’s about gather task-flow error points.  I’ve found using a table or chart showing the differences in usability testing vs. market research goals, methods and analysis can help educate market research types who are confused about or unaware of the differences.  Another handy tool is WebCredible’s article on the differences between focus groups and usability testing.

#6 – There’s no budget for usability (it’s expensive)

I partly blame us usability practitioners for causing this confusion about usability and budgets.  It doesn’t help that well known usability gurus charge $38,000 for a simple usability review of a web site.  Although this may be their cost, your cost might be significantly less.  The assumption prospects may make is if they charge that, so do you.

Also, there are many usability agency web sites that make no mention of the cost of their various usability services at all.

And it doesn’t help that the usability industry itself has no standard definitions for simple usability terms and prices vs. services guidelines for things like remote testing, usability reviews, heuristic evaluations, etc. etc. etc.  We as an industry are helping to cause this confusion.

Solution – Educate about the costs of usability testing

The reality is your usability testing might cost far less than $38,000 for a basic usability review, and you need to tell prospects that.  Also, applying remote research methods early in the design process is a very cost-effective way to run usability testing.  Informing prospects about the costs of usability, based on each type of test (in-person, remote, moderated, un-moderated, etc.) can really help to clear up all the confusion.

A couple of good resources to use are Bolt | Peter’s article on comparing remote to in-person usability testing and the how-to book, Remote Research which has case studies and related cost/benefit information for low cost remote testing methods.

#7 – Usability isn’t needed, we use web site metrics and A/B testing

I hear this often from eCommerce firms that have dedicated web analytics or optimization teams.  The feeling here is they already have detailed reporting and testing for all user interactions.  Their reporting, and resulting A/B or multivariate testing already provide optimizations, thus no usability testing is needed.  Some prospects mistakenly believe “hard” interaction data via A/B testing is much better than “soft” usability testing data.

Solution – Educate about the “why” of usability

Moderated usability testing is the only tool I know that can best uncover the “why” of user behavior.  Explaining this to metrics-happy companies can be a difficult proposition.  It helps to inform them that there’s a difference between only knowing that button “B” had 25% more clicks than button “A”, versus WHY button “B” had 25% more clicks.  The usability testing “why” information can be used to make better decisions about future tests.  This is because user reasoning and behavior is now part of the A/B testing equation.

A helpful tool you might use is my post on A/B vs Usability testing.

Conclusion: Top 7 reasons why you can’t sell usability

So those are my top 7 reasons why you can’t sell usability to prospects.  The issue is selling can’t happen if there is a lack of understanding about what usability is.  The best approach I’ve found is to educated prospects about usability, based on their reason given for not needing it.  If properly educated and informed about what usability is, how it works and how it can provide benefits, prospects almost don’t need any selling.  They will actually approach you with a potential project.

Perhaps I’ve not covered a reason you’ve run across?  I hope you’ll take a moment to share with us in the comments your typical reasons, and how you deal with them!

Selling Usability Handy Resources Guide:

Articles

• Allan Colville, Taming Goliath: Selling UX to Large Companies (part 1 of 2)
• Bolt | Peters, Remote Testing versus Lab Testing
• Craig Tomlin, A/B, Alpha/Beta or Usability Testing, Whats Better? Part I, A/B Testing
• Jakob Nielsen, Paper Prototyping, Getting User Data Before You Code
• Jared Spool, The $300 Million Button
• Kate Walser, UX in the Boardroom: A Solid Case for Investing in UX
• WebCredible, Focus groups vs. usability testing – what, when and why?

Books

• John S. Rhodes, Selling Usability, User Experience Infiltration Tactics
• Nate Bolt and Tony Tulathimutte, Remote Research, Real Users, Real Time, Real Research
• William Ury, Getting Past No, Negotiating in Difficult Situations

Calculators

• Human Factors International, ROI Tools

Lists of Selling Tools

• Usability Professional’s Association, Selling Usability whitepapers, links, presentations
• Nielsen Norman Group, $38,000 Design Reviews (Usability Inspections)

Report

• Nielsen Norman Group, Usability Return on Investment

Perceived Affordance, Usability and Online Sales:

One of the most important goals of web site usability testing is finding and fixing perceived affordance issues.  You can increase your usability, conversion and thus your web site Return on Investment (ROI) by improving perceived affordance.

What’s perceived affordance?  For web site owners, it’s the art and science of designing objects like ‘buy now’ buttons in such a way that your web site visitors know just by looking at it that they can click on it.

One of the most important functions of web site usability testing is to evaluate the perceived affordance of links and buttons.  By testing and optimizing perceived affordance of critical objects, such as “Add to Cart” or “Buy Now” buttons, web sites can dramatically increase conversion, and thus ROI.

Definition of Perceived Affordance:

According to Don Norman, the Godfather of design and usability and the author of the book “The Design of Everyday Things,” the concept of perceived affordance is defined this way;

“The word “affordance” was originally invented by the perceptual psychologist J. J. Gibson (1977, 1979) to refer to the actionable properties between the world and an actor (a person or animal).

What the designer cares about is whether the user perceives that some action is possible (or in the case of perceived non-affordances, not possible).

In product design, where one deals with real, physical objects, there can be both real and perceived affordances, and the two need not be the same. In graphical, screen-based interfaces, all that the designer has available is control over perceived affordances. The computer system, with its keyboard, display screen, pointing device (e.g., mouse) and selection buttons (e.g., mouse buttons) affords pointing, touching, looking, and clicking on every pixel of the display screen.”

According to William Gaver, there are three categories of affordance:

• Perceptible
• False
• Hidden

By evaluating the design elements that communicate perceived affordance for various objects in your web site, you can determine which category an object fits, and if wrong, take steps to correct it.

Perceived Affordance is Critical for Your Web Site Success:

When you think about your web site, your ROI in fact lives or dies on your ability to successfully manipulate design to improve perceived affordance.  Your web site is primarily a one-way pipe of information, the majority being visual information (with the potential for some audio).  You provide the visual information, and your web site visitors consume and comprehend it (or at least try to).

Because the primary interaction that takes place on your site is one-way visual, you must be zealous in your attempts to understand and evaluate how well you are communicating perceived affordance.  Testing and optimization of elements that impact perceived affordance should be your number one goal, because it directly impacts your conversion rates, and thus your web site’s ROI.

Actions your web site visitors take such as mouse clicks or typing characters, although very important, are never going to happen unless you provide clear, consistent and effective visual clues about how to take actions.  You do this by continually testing and optimizing the crucial elements of your site that establish and communicate perceived affordance.

Examples of Perceived Affordance in Buttons:

Let’s examine a few examples of perceptible perceived affordance in action.  In order to visually communicate that a button is clickable and will enable the site visitor to take action, it is necessary to use design to visually separate, distinguish and illuminate a function.

As demonstrated above, Amazon.com uses many design elements to generate high perceived affordance of their “Add to Shopping Cart” button, including use of:

• Strongly contrasting yellow button color
• Only use of that yellow color on the page
• Heavy outline border around button
• Round strongly contrasting icon of shopping basket
• Text in button “Add to Shopping Cart”
• Larger font for button text
• Elongated shape, round on left side, squared on right side
• Gradient fill in top of button to visually mimic 3-D shape
• Dark blue background color for surrounding box

Another example is eBay, which creates a high perceived affordance of the “Buy It Now” button.

For eBay, the “Buy It Now” button uses multiple design elements to effectively communicate perceived affordance:

• Strongly contrasting blue button color
• Only use of that blue button color on the page
• Largest sized button on page
• Text in button “Buy It Now”
• Larger font for button text
• Strong contrasting colors, white text on blue background
• Dark gray background color for surrounding box

To provide contrast, let’s examine use of design elements that appear to provide a function, but in fact do not.  This is known as false affordance, and can work against web site visitors.

False Affordance:

A false affordance is an apparent affordance that has no real function.  False affordance is a major contributor to lower web site conversion and lost online sales.  This is because a false affordance breaks the faith a web site visitor has in the web site’s functional abilities, and causes doubt and confusion.

Example of a False Affordance:

In this example, the prominently displayed “Featured Gift” and photo of the toy seem to indicate that more information about the toy might be available by clicking, but where?  Web site visitors who come across the display are left wondering, because no clear action button seems available for this toy.

A common tool many web site designers use is to make the image of the product clickable.  But that is not the case here.

In fact, there is no action available, the image of the toy is not clickable, nor is the heading “Featured Gift.”  There is no way to navigate to the featured toy using the visual designs offered, thus the connection with a “false affordance.”

There are many types of designs that can lead to false affordance, some of the more common being:

• Objects that look like buttons, but are not
• Photos of objects that are not links, especially if place with photos that are links
• Placing a blue outline around an image or link, yet no link is present
• Underlined text that is not a link
• Use of blue in text that is not a link
• Form data entry fields that are not active

For web site owners, false affordances are extremely damaging, and cause many more problems than simply lost clicks to a particular item.

By prominently displaying a false affordance on the home page, a web site causes damages including:

• Lost faith (visitors wonder – “is this clickable, what about this, or this?”)
• Lost focus (visitors spend more time trying to solve a navigation problem than shopping)
• Lost sales (frustrated visitors will often not complete their task)
• Lost trust (many visitors will simply leave the site – never to return)

Finding and fixing false affordances should be a high-priority job of every web site owner, especially those who own eCommerce sites – as false affordances  cost lost visitors, conversion and sales.

Poor Design and Hidden Perceived Affordance:

As with false affordance, poorly designed techniqes can hurt perceived affordance and can cause major performance issues for web site owners as well.  This is referred to as Hidden Affordance.  In the case of poor design, visual clues that a link or function is present are not displayed as visually separate, distinguished and illuminated.

Example of poor perceived affordance:

The example above demonstrates a site that provides web site visitors with a display of products available for purchase.  However, the function associated with “Checkout Now” – in this case a link to an online order form – is poorly displayed because it has minimal visual clues as to it’s function, and thus has low perceived affordance.

Among the perceived affordance problems with the “Checkout Now” button are:

• No button shape around the text
• Yellow text color is not a strong contrast against the white page
• No underline when mouse rolls over text
• Text in button visually close to “Back to results text”
• Missing a background color to call attention to location
• Upper left location not typically associated with ‘continue’ action

Improve Perceived Affordance with Testing:

So how do you improve your web site objects perceived affordance – with testing and re-testing.  There are four primary types of testing that can be used to analyze and optimize perceived affordance.  They are:

1. Expert Usability Review – Also called a “heuristic review.” This review uses expert analysis of interaction devices such as buttons, links and related functions against industry standards and best practices.  The best form of an expert usability review is to receive several, since each expert might focus on unique aspects that grouped together form a better picture of what needs to be improved and why.
2. Usability Testing – Using 1-on-1 moderated testing, a web site owner can quickly find problems with task flows for critical tasks.  These often involve issues with perceived affordance.  Because usability testing only needs about 7 or so participants, and because it uses real web site visitors, and can be done very quickly and for low cost, usability testing is a great way to find issues with perceived affordance.  It is the only method a web site owner can use to determine the “why” of an actual web site visitor’s behavior.
3. A/B Testing – Two different versions of a button, link or related object can be tested on your web site at the same time using a traffic split.  50% of the traffic goes to the version that has the “A” version (the original version of the object usually) and 50% to the new test “B” version.  After enough statistically significant results are captured, a winner can be picked based on interaction rate.  A/B testing is pretty reliable, assuming enough traffic is present.  However, it won’t tell you the “why” of the visitor behavior, and of course it might negatively impact your conversion if the “B” test version is worse than the original version.
4. Multivariate Testing – For sites with large amounts of traffic, multiple versions of objects can all be tested at the same time.  This allows for rapid analysis and iteration of the best possible combination of elements.  The downside to multivariate testing is it needs lots and lots of traffic to establish statistically significant results.  In addition, as with A/B testing the “why” of visitor behavior won’t be know, only which combination of elements performs the best.

Conclusion, Increase Your Usability and Website ROI with Perceived Affordance

Perceived affordance is critical to your web site success, and to your conversion and ROI.  Perceived affordance determines how well your interaction object designs communicate their function and use to your web site visitors.  Poor perceived affordance hurts your web site interaction, conversion and sales and results in lower ROI.  You can increase your ROI by conducting testing and optimization with the interaction objects on your web site.  An excellent way to identify potential issues and optimizations of perceived affordance is with usability testing.  Continual testing and re-testing ensures you are maximizing your potential usability, perceived affordance and thus ROI of your web site.

For more information about maximizing your web site’s perceived affordance and ROI contact me.

Usability Testing and Online Marketing Campaigns

Usability testing in action

Usability testing is a tool typically thought of for use with improving web sites or web-based applications, but if you are responsible for online marketing here’s important news – usability testing can provide you with a killer online marketing campaign.

What you and your competing marketing managers may not realize is usability testing an online marketing campaign is an easy, fast and cheap way to increase conversion – and increase the ROI of your marketing spend.  Why?  Because usability testing is all about improving tasks, tasks like;

• Understanding the message of an online advertisement
• Easily clicking through to a landing page
• Quickly completing a landing page form
• Efficiently entering data in a buy-flow to purchase a product

Usability and online marketing optimization

So why should you add usability testing as one of your online marketing optimization tools?  According to Forrester’s US Interactive Marketing Forecast, interactive marketing will near $55 Billion, represent 21% of all marketing spend, and interactive marketing media will cannibalize traditional media to do it.

The money you invest in online marketing must not only equal traditional marketing results, it has to beat it – because your competitors are busy doing the exact same thing.

Reasons to add usability testing

There are several reasons why adding usability testing to your online marketing optimization mix is highly productive:

First:  Usability testing is fast and easy

Usability testing doesn’t need thousands of statistically significant responses or multiple focus groups.  To usability test a task like going through an online marketing flow, you don’t need a lot of time, effort or input.  It’s fast and easy to quickly create a test and learn from it.  This can come in handy when you are trying to make decisions about important elements in your future online marketing campaign – well before launch.

For example, while your online marketing campaign is still in development you could quickly use usability testing to determine how easy or difficult it is for your prospects to click through to a landing page, understand the message on the page, complete a form, and/or successfully navigate the order or sales path.  By watching just 7 usability participants try to complete your online marketing path, you’ll know instantly where there are problems in your task flow – and will probably have a pretty good idea of what to do to improve it.

Second:  Usability testing is cheap and very low risk

Setting up a usability test, asking 7 participants to go through the test, observing their behavior and debriefing them at the end can all be done in less than a week for minimal cost – especially if you use remote moderated testing.

If you compare asking 7 participants to try to complete an online marketing flow, versus conducting an A/B test where perhaps hundreds or thousands of real potential customers are going through the flow, usability is far cheaper because you’re not losing orders or sales due to a potentially bad “B” version.  And usability testing is cheaper because you don’t have to test live production versions of a campaign, you can test pre-launch versions and not risk the potential costs involved in creating a bad live campaign.

Third:  Usability testing uses your real target prospects

Testing with the actual people you are targeting means you get feedback directly from the people you want to engage.  Want to know what your actual prospects think as they interact with your online marketing campaign?  You can with usability testing.  By finding test participants who exactly match your typical online marketing prospect, you’ll be testing your campaign with the actual people who could be interacting with it.

By evaluating how easy or difficult it is for your online marketing prospects to interact with your online marketing flow, you’ll have credible feedback to help you improve the experience.   This takes the guesswork out of trying to determine the “why” of user actions, something click-stream, A/B or log file analysis simply cannot provide.

What to usability test?

Usability test a landing page to optimize conversion

So what elements in your online marketing campaign should you usability test?  The possibilities are endless, but there are probably 3 or 4 critical elements of any campaign that would be simple, cheap and effective to test.  And the information you receive from the test can improve your online marketing campaign right away.  They are:

1. Call to Action Function – Conducting a usability test of an online advertisement with a call to action button is a quick way to determine if your call to action graphic is doing what it’s supposed to.  Does the test participant see the graphic in context with other ads or content?  Does the button look like a button and stimulate response?  What does the participant expect to see after they click the button?  Usability testing will provide all those answers, and more.
2. Landing Page Content and Information Architecture – Once your prospect is on your landing page, does the content meet their expectations?  What about the information provided, is it clear and easily understood?  Does the participant know where to go, and what to do next?
3. Order or Buy Flow Form Function – Assuming you have a form on your landing page, is it easy to use?  Does the participant make any mistakes, or have confusion when entering data?  How long does it take to enter the data?  Are there too many fields, or not enough, from the participants viewpoint?
4. Next Steps – After completing the form, does the participant know what will happen next?  What are the participant’s expectations?  Does the participant receive their expected feedback?  Are they satisfied with the experience?

Conclusion – Add usability testing to your online marketing and make it Killer!

Adding usability testing to your online marketing efforts can help you take your ho-hum online marketing campaign to killer marketing campaign status.  Usability testing does this because it’s all about tasks, not opinions, it is cheap and very low risk and it uses your real target prospects to identify where there are problems in your flow.

With the increasing use of online marketing in the overall media mix it becomes even more important to make sure your online marketing efforts are optimized for success, and usability testing is a tool you can use to accomplish that.

For more information on how to add usability testing to your online marketing mix just contact me, I’ll be glad to help you increase your conversion.