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
Randolph G. Bias is an associate professor in the University of Texas at Austin School of Information. With a Ph.D. in cognitive psychology from The University of Texas at Austin, Bias spent two decades in industry as a human factors professional, addressing software usability for AT&T Bell Labs, IBM, and then BMC Software where he founded and managed the usability department.
Dr. Deborah J. Mayhew is owner and principal of Deborah J. Mayhew & Associates, a consulting firm based in Massachusetts, offering courses and consulting on all aspects of Usability Engineering and user interface design. Clients include American Airlines, AT&T, Ford,Harvard Univeristy, and NASA. Dr. Mayhew received her Ph.D. in Experimental Cognitive Psychology from Tufts University. She is the author of Principles and Guidelines in Software User Interface Design (Prentice Hall), a coeditor of Cost-Justifying Usability (Academic Press), and a contributor to Human Factors and Web Development.
