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| Getting More ROI From Design. Posted on 06/26/2001. |
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A few of us at Adaptive Path were interviewed for the recent Forrester report, "Get ROI From Design." Notwithstanding, it's still a pretty good report, encouraging businesses and agencies to think about their work in measurable metrics--in order for Design to be taken seriously, it must produce results. Such "ROI" discussions, and the Forrester report is the same, always focus on how design improves the end-user experience, thus increasing sales/productivity and/or reducing customer service. While this is true, it's only half the story. Good design should improve operational ROI by lowering the costs of development. Take for example my work at Epinions. One of the goals of the 2.0 redesign was to build an easy-to-extend interface system. We pretty much did that, and it made the creative team somewhat superfluous (this was one of my reasons for leaving). Now, Epinions has no creative team (4 fewer employees, so that's a savings of around $250k/year), but the product managers can take the toolkit we developed and continue to build out new features. The point being, smart design isn't just in the end-product... It's in the process of getting there. And very-easy-to-measure ROI emerges.
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COMMENT #1
Thank you again for providing me with an excellent source to point to to state what I have been saying to clients, prospective clients, and the company that employs me. This echos the cornerstones of development argument, which is Web / Information applications should be usable, maintainable, reliable, and repeatable to be a true success. It should scale with little extra effort.
Posted by vanderwal @ 06/26/2001 02:02 PM PST [link to this comment]
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