
Usability Engineering
guaranteed the "success" (in terms of sheer number of sales) of the
upgrade. The installation program supplied with the
upgrade
had
such a horrible user interface that the customers needed on average
two 20-minute calls to the vendor's toll-free
support
line before
they had succeeded in installing their upgrade. Given that it costs
about $20 to service a more typical, 5-minute
support
call,
the
installation user interface (which could probably have been fixed
with a minimum of usability engineering effort) ended up costing
the vendor more than the $70 per user they made selling the
upgrade.
4
In general, the need to sav ...