Cost-Justifying Usability (Interactive Technologies)

Today's increasingly competitive and fiscally constrained business environment is fostering the need to cut costs and justify expenditures. Usability engineering is not yet universally accepted, nor is it yet an integrated aspect of software engineering, and would-be usability champions need more help than ever to win the funding necessary to introduce and promote usability engineering techniques.

Cost-Justifying Usability is the first book to address pragmatically and in detail the question of how usability engineering professionals and their managers can cost-justify their proposals and efforts. The book offers specific techniques for quantifying costs and benefits, making a convincing and successful business case for investment in usability engineering.

This book comprises a thorough and well-integrated collection of chapters written by experienced and prominent usability experts. Taken together, these chapters provide readers with:

An overall framework for cost-justifying usability engineering programs that can be applied to any context

An examination of the unique factors and issues in cost-justifying usability efforts for three very different types of organizations: vendor companies, international development organizations, and contractor companies

Case studies of successful cost-justification efforts

A look at some special issues regarding cost-justification of usability, including"discount"usability engineering techniques, success factors for introducing usability engineering into development organizations, specialized tools for usability cost-justification, and a look to the future of usability engineering

Practical and effective insight for human factors professionals, interface designers, software development managers, and human factors educators