As we covered previously, inefficiencies in the workplace can cost business time and money, impacting all aspects of your business. Employee satisfaction also suffers when processes are outdated, or difficult to use. With Cask as your partner, you can discover areas where the work can be streamlined to achieve a better user experience and process. Below are a few real world examples for how our team can help yours realize your efficiency goals with a robust UX Design, boosting employee satisfaction in the process.
Unintuitive Interfaces Waste Time
Kelly accesses a software system once a day as part of her job. The design is unintuitive and it’s hard for people to figure out how to use it—especially new hires. It takes her 5 minutes to concentrate and perform one daily task. This baseline measurement estimates she spends 25 minutes per week on the task. After addressing pain points and redesigning the application, usability testing shows on average that users can perform the same task in 2 minutes.
This reduces time spent by 85% and saves 13 hours each year per user. If there are 150 employees like Kelly, this works out to a potential annual savings of 1,950 hours. If the average employee salary is $70 per hour, the value of this time equates to $136,500.
Outdated Systems Slow People Down
John uses a software system critical to his work and spends a lot of his day using the interface. The software is outdated and pages load extremely slow. While going about his day and performing top tasks, it’s estimated he spends an average of 16 seconds waiting for pages to refresh. If he experiences this on 30 pages per day, he spends about 8 minutes of his workday waiting for the screen. This equals 40 minutes per week or 2,080 minutes (roughly 35 hours) per year. If the average hourly rate for John’s position is $50 per hour, the value of this time equals $1,750 annually.
If his company upgrades to a new system and reduces page load from 16 seconds to 3, that’s an improvement of 137%! In a large organization—if there’s hundreds of employees experiencing the same as John—the value of this time is exponential.
By improving page performance, John is not only more productive and engaged but he’s a lot happier, too.
Inefficient Searching Costs Time and Money
Marion works in a busy and stressful IT department as a support representative. Each day, the department receives about 100 tickets. On average, 10 of them ask questions about getting email to work on a smartphone. There is a tutorial on the company intranet, but its poor interface design and search experience means employees aren’t finding it and go straight to IT instead. If IT representatives spend an average of 5 minutes each time to answer this question, that equals 50 minutes per day or 216 hours per year. If the average support person’s hourly rate is $35 per hour, that equals a value of $7,560 spent annually on answering one common question. If there’s common questions the support team answers regularly, you can imagine the costs adding up!
By implementing a new self-service software design and optimizing its search function, the IT department can decrease the frequency of common inquiries like this one. The overall quantity of tickets goes down and the speed in which other issues can be resolved is improved.
Measuring an Interface Design
Making calculations for predictive return on investment of a design is beneficial to understand the impact a well-designed experience can make. There are different kinds of metrics that can be used for calculating hidden opportunity costs in an interface:
- Time: What is the average amount of time it takes for users to perform tasks? How easy is it for them to operate the system to find what they are looking for?
- Money: Using estimates from the amount of time spent on tasks, what is the predictive dollar value of cost savings annually?
- Work Volume: What is the number of department support tickets, emails, and phone calls received about common topics? What are the associated costs with responding to them?
- User Satisfaction: Do people enjoy using the interface to accomplish work? Overall, does staff feel empowered in their work or held back?
Let Cask Show You the Way
Investing in service portal UX design can save a business significant amounts of time and money long term, resulting in positive gains for your business.
The UX design process strongly focuses on how a system works and all the processes in place that contribute to people getting work done. Click To TweetAddressing business goals and user needs, while maximizing efficiency, is captured in the beauty of a modern workflow management system. Let Cask show you the way to realize maximum return on investment with effective, impactful, and high quality UX service portal design.
