TABLE OF CONTENTS Let us consider a hypothetical usability engineering plan and see how its costs can be estimated. Then we will incorporate this plan into scenarios involving development in four different types of projects, and see how you would conduct cost-benefit analyses of that plan for each project. The four scenarios involve the development of:
An application for internal users
A commercial application by a vendor company
An e-commerce Web site
A product information Web site
Imagine that a development organization is planning to develop an application for use by an internal user organization (e.g., within a bank or an insurance company). The project is of moderate complexity and cost, and will result in an application that will be used by 250 users. Once developed and installed, the application is expected to be in production for approximately 5 years before any major revisions are made.
First, the final results of a cost-benefit analysis are presented. Then, in the steps that follow, the derivation of the final results are shown. Table 3.2 shows the overall calculation of the cost of a usability engineering plan proposed by the project usability engineer. The first column identifies the overall project phase. The second column identifies which Usability Engineering Lifecycle tasks (see Fig. 3.1) and techniques are planned in each phase. The third, fourth, fifth and sixth columns identify the number of work hours required by usability engineers, developers, managers, and users to complete each task.
