How do you prove the value of design in your organisation?

How can you take something so difficult to quantify and give it a value in terms that the world of business would understand?

The answer is Return on Investment (ROI).

Why does ROI matter in business?

ROI is used as a Key Performance Indicator (KPI) - you can tell we're into business territory here with all the acronyms 😊 - by businesses to determine the profitability of an expense. It's essentially about the business getting its money's worth from anything they invest its money in. If they buy some new software, how long until it essentially repays the business in terms of the savings it makes in its everyday use?

Why use ROI to promote UX internally?

It's a rare case indeed for a designer to have never had their organisation say no to a suggestion of iterating on a design or perhaps looking to solve the larger problem, or even just having a project shut down without any warning it was coming.

These, and many other scenarios like them, are symptoms of design not being valued in an organisation. One of the best ways to build that understanding of value is to communicate in a language that business people understand; in numbers, in return on investment.

So rather than talking up the potential upside of having design valued in your organisation - I'm assuming, dear reader, that you agree with the benefits of an inclusive design process - let's look at a hypothetical example that you can use as a template to communicate the ROI on UX design.

Putting ROI into action for UX

Your organisation has 200 sales staff. Every day the sales staff collectively make a number of the same type of errors when inputting customer information into their internal system.

We can take this data, along with some other easily accessible data points, and calculate the cost of these errors.

Here's the formula we can use:

(Number of errors) * (Average repair time) * (Employee cost) * (Number of employees) = Cost savings

Let's say that, on average, every user makes the same error twice per day.
That's 10 of the same errors per week, per employee.
With a little bit of digging, we know that the average time to rectify each of those errors is 10 minutes.
The employee cost (or the hourly rate an employee is paid) is $10.
And we know that we have 200 employees.

So here's how much these errors cost the business per week:

(10 errors/week) * (0.1666 hours) * ($10/hour) * (200 employees) = $3,332/week

With 52 weeks in a year, that is:

$3,332 * 52 = $173,264

Now we know the costs to the business if these everyday errors continue to happen, we can make a case for solving this problem with design.

The designer estimates the work to take 1 week (40 hours), at an hourly rate of $20.
That's a total of $800.

But just the time spent on design isn't everything we want to cover. Let's incorporate 3 rounds of usability testing with 6 users (the sales staff making the errors), with each test taking 30 minutes.

That's 9 hours in total, at $10 per hour per employee, which comes to a cost of $90.

Let's not forget about the developers that need to build the proposed solution.
8 hours of work at an hourly rate of $15.
That's a total cost of development of $120.

So that is $800 for design, $90 for usability testing, and $120 to implement the solution.

So our total cost of design and development to remove that one recurring error is:

$800 + $90 + $120 = $1,010

Remember, that recurring error is costing the business $173,264 in employee time every year!

By implementing the new design, the business can realise its investment in less than 2 days!

This relatively tiny investment, when laid out in this way, makes it much easier to understand from a business perspective.

What business wouldn't spend $1,010 to save $173,264 a year?!

So there you have it, a practical example of how you can use the language of business, in this case ROI, to communicate the benefits of a user-centred design process.

If you can learn to speak the language of business, you can effectively communicate the value of design. This is just one small step in building a greater understanding of design within an organisation and increasing UX maturity.