Why Do Usability Testing?
Poor user interface design can have a significant effect on user productivity. Consider a very simple transaction, such as filling in an on-line data entry form. Suppose a website has 20 end users, who perform this transaction approximately 80 times a day (quite typical for high frequency users). This adds up to 368,000 transactions per year (20 users working 230 days a year, performing 80 transactions per day). If a screen could be redesigned to reduce the transaction time per screen by 10 seconds, savings of 1022 hours, or 25.5 person-weeks could be realized. If improvement on a single screen of the site could increase productivity by 1/2 of a person-year, clearly improvements across the whole site will have a very dramatic effect on productivity.
