Many companies hesitate to spend their interactive marketing budget on usability analysis projects. What these companies don’t know is that website changes and redesigns after a usability analysis have very high ROI. Many business users underestimate the power of usability projects, but usability analysis improves completed transactions, customer satisfaction, and brand loyalty.
In 2008, the Nielsen Norman Group found that site redesigns based on usability analysis improved key performance indicators by 83%. Where else in your business can you find improvement so readily?
To double a site’s business, you can double the number of unique visitors. However, this would be very expensive, requiring that you more than double the advertising budget (assuming you’re already advertising under the most-promising keywords, and thus need to buy traffic from less promising or more expensive sources).
Alternatively, you can double the conversion rate and achieve the same business improvement. It’s still fairly cheap to double conversion rates, though it’s not as cheap as it was, say, in 2000. According to our survey, spending 10% of your development budget on usability should improve your conversion rate by 83%. You can probably double the conversion rate by spending less than 15% of your development budget. In most cases, it’s far cheaper to use 15% of your development budget than to more than double your advertising budget.
Examples of usability case studies with high ROI are easy to come by. If you can make small, inexpensive changes to your website that will have a big impact, what’s stopping you?