By , Head of Strategic Research

When looking for inspiration and a slightly different angle for a blog to mark World Usability Day I happened across a newsletter that I wrote in June 2000 titled ‘Dotcom Disasters’. For those of you who were still in short trousers at that time, the summer of 2000 was the beginning of the Dotcom collapse that saw funding pulled from numerous high profile Internet start ups.

At the time the most prominent failure, and the main focus of my missive, was a site called Boo.com. It had received over $200m worth of funding, assembled a highly talented and creative team with the remit to develop an innovative, state of the art B2C website selling sports wear. This it had done, and a year previously had launched in a blaze of publicity, albeit five months later than the initial publicity had promised. However, within a year Boo.com had failed and gone to the wall.

What has this got to do with World Usability Day I hear you ask? Well the answer is simple. The site wasn’t usable! It was innovative, it was stunning and one that everyone in the industry admired technically, but as I pointed out in my newsletter it had fundamental flaws. Principal among theses flaws were basic errors that suggest despite the enormous budget available, simple tests were not conducted. The site didn’t work properly on an Apple computer, required a series of plug-ins for anyone to get it to work correctly, and crucially at a time when the vast majority of Internet users were using dial-up connections, it was ridiculously slow to load. It was dead in the water before it started.

It is tempting to think that back then there was little awareness of usability issues, but this is patently not the case. Below I have pulled together some quotes from usability advocates from the 90s and 00s which are still relevant today. So the information was there but then, just as in some sectors today, getting organisations to invest in Usability practices was tough, despite the obvious benefits of identifying usability issues early on. We might have expected someone on the Boo.com team to test the site, and maybe they did at their own T1 offices on a PC with all the required software installed. But after launch the cost of improvements and changes became exponential and investors fled.

It is a salutary lesson to everyone: test early, test continuously and understand how people want to access your digital presence. That way both the user and the organisation will be happy.

• “If there is a choice, test early, because more than 50% of all defects are usually introduced in the requirements stage alone.”(Edward Kit 1998)

• “When systems match user needs, satisfaction often improves dramatically. In a 1992 Gartner Group study, usability methods raised user satisfaction ratings for a system by 40%.”(Bias & Mayhew, 1994)

• “The average UI has some 40 flaws. Correcting the easiest 20 of these yields an average improvement in usability of 50%. The big win, however, occurs when usability is factored in from the beginning. This can yield efficiency improvements of over 700%.” (Landauer, 1995)

• “Savings from earlier vs. later changes: Changes cost less when made earlier in the development life cycle. Twenty changes in a project, at 32 hours per change and [a minimal] hourly rate of $35, would cost $22,400. Reducing this to 8 hours per change would reduce the cost to $5,600. Savings = $16,800.” (Human Factors International, 2001)

• “One study estimated that improving the customer experience increases the number of buyers by 40% and increase order size by 10%.” (Creative Good, 2000)

• “A bad design can cost a Web site 40 percent of repeat traffic. A good design can keep them coming back. A few tests can make the difference.” (Kalin, 1999)

• “The magnitude of usability improvements is usually large. This is not a matter of increasing use by a few percent. It is common for usability efforts to result in a hundred percent or more increase in traffic or sales.” (Nielsen, July 1999)