Benefits of Human Factors

Reducing errors is just one of the benefits of good human factors engineering. Well researched and engineered designs can reduce liability and the risk of product recalls, reduce product development costs and shorten time to market, reduce training and support costs, reduce product maintenance costs, and improve customer value.

Reducing Liability and the Risk of Product Recalls

	An internal FDA survey found that 44% of product recalls stem from use-related errors attributable to poor design.
	Product recalls are expensive. Not only are companies recalling products confronted with the cost of recall and risk of law suites, but recalls have a negative impact on product and corporate brand values.
	Designing safer products reduces the risk of recall and legal liabilities.

Reducing Development Costs

	A survey of 8,000 software projects cited incomplete or changing requirements, and lack of involvement of users as key reasons why projects exceeded budget or ran over schedule. Getting the requirements right, up front, is key to cost management. Helping target users visualize requirements through design prototypes is an inexpensive way to discover, clarify, or validate requirements. Standish Group.
	The cost of fixing a requirements problem late in a development cycle can be orders of magnitude higher than the cost of addressing the same problem early on. Rubey, Browning, and Roberts (1989), Cost effectiveness of software QA, Proceedings of IEEE of 1989, Dayton, Ohio.
	Around 63% of software projects exceed their cost estimates. The top four reasons for this are: – Frequent requests for changes from users – Overlooked tasks – Users' lack of understanding of their own requirements – Insufficient user-analyst communication and understanding Lederer, A L & Prasad, J (1992) Nine Management Guidelines for Better Cost Estimating. Communications of the ACM, 35 (2), pg 51-59.
	Usability failures can add $6 million to an application's cost. J. P. Dalton Forrester Research, April 2002.

Shortening Time to Market

	Don't waste time (and money) developing unnecessary features. Early human factors work, especially usability testing of design concepts can minimize surprises at later stages in the process, when fixing a design will introduce delays.
	Well documented human factors design activities can reduce FDA concerns about device safety and usability for 510k or PMA submissions.
	Nailing-down design at an early stage can reduce total development time by 30%. Cognetics.com

Reduced Training and Support Costs

	Typically, redesign according to usability principles reduces training costs by 25%. T. Landauer The Trouble with Computers, MIT Press, 1996.
	Norwich Union reduced help-desk costs by one-third by redesigning a core system according to usability principals. The Hiser Group.

Reduced Maintenance Costs

	Eighty percent of software lifecycle costs occur after the product is released, in the maintenance phase. Of that work, 80% is due to unmet or unforeseen user requirements; only 20% is due to bugs or reliability problems. Karat, C (1993) Usability Engineering in Dollars and Cents, IEEE Software, May Issue pg 89.
	It is much cheaper to fix design defects early in the development process, before it gets propagated throughout the product. Compared to fixing a design defect during design, it is 10 times more costly to fix it during development, and 100 times more costly to fix it after the product is released. R Pressman Software Engineering: A Practitioner's Approach, 1992.

Improved Customer Value

	Studies demonstrate the fact that usability tends to float to the top in terms of a design priority. That's true of all the research we've done regarding dozens of different kinds of medical devices. Usability is always rated very high, if not the highest, among the 10 or 12 most important attributes. M. Wiklund, American Institute for Research.
	Average productivity improvement through products developed by user-centered design processes is 50%. T. Landauer The Trouble with Computers, MIT Press, 1996.
	The Gartner Group estimated that projects that use a prototyping approach with end-users typically increases productivity by 25%. Harrison et al, in Cost-justifying usability, R. Bias & D. Mayhew, 1994.
	"For developers and manufacturers, the advantages of creating usable products far outweigh the costs. The rule of thumb: every dollar invested in ease of use returns $10 to $100." ibm.com, 2001

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