Abstract
This chapter presents a framework for cost-justifying usability engineering efforts on software development projects, by describing how to calculate the costs and estimate the benefits of each of the usability engineering lifecycle tasks that can potentially be applied. A usability engineering cost-benefit analysis is conducted in the software development process for two major reasons: To demonstrate that usability engineering is a viable and significant cost-saving approach and to plan the usability engineering program for a particular development project. The first step in cost-justifying usability engineering on a particular software development project is to lay out a usability engineering plan for that project. The usability engineering lifecycle documents a structured and systematic approach to address usability within the product development process. It consists of a set of usability engineering tasks applied in a particular order at specified points in an overall software development lifecycle. The four cost-benefit analysis examples described in this chapter are based on simple subsets of all actual costs and potential benefits and very simple and basic assumptions regarding the value of money over time. The sample cost-justification analyses suggest that it is usually easy to justify a significant investment of time and money in usability engineering during the development of software applications.
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