pure and applied

Investing in UX

One of the recurring difficulties of 'selling' the value of investing in user experience (UX) to a business is the moment when a decision-maker with a number-crunching bent says something scuttling, along the lines of "how much  will we save or make by undertaking a thorough <insert usability activity>".

It's very hard to point to any demonstrable measure of value and make a compelling reply like "profits will rise by 15%".

But numbers speak and we need to find ways to tell great stories about UX using numbers. Props then to Jon Lax at the UX Magazine, whose article on investing in UX makes a compelling case for looking at UX from a macro point of view when assessing value. To make it fun he invested $50,000 in the theory.

On November 1, 2006 we invested $50,000 of our company’s money into a fund consisting of 10 companies we felt did a great a job at user experience. We wanted to test a hypothesis that companies who focus on UX will see it reflected in their stock price. The premise was to invest $5,000 in each company and hold the stock for 1 year. We called it the UX Fund.

His portfolio of UX-focused companies outperformed the market with a spectacular 39.7% growth in value over 12 months.

Find how it happened at UX Magazine.

Ethical E-commerce

Ethical e-commerce sites are a growing phenomenon with EcoGeek pointing to buygreen.com in the US, and with the local start-up GreenPages site launching today to service the Australian market.

The comforting thing about this is that it points to a perception amongst businesses that there is a significant and growing market for ethically produced, sustainable products.

Undeniably this is a step in the right direction, but I'm also looking forward to a time when the values such sites espouse, and market to, are ingrained more widely in retail and e-commerce so that ethical e-commerce is no longer a point of difference, but a point of sameness.

What do you think?

Link.

UPDATE: It was remiss of me not to mention Neco Superstore in my original post. You can even buy carbon credits there!

said adrian said has moved

Irregular visitors to this site will notice that my personal blog has moved house.

My personal blog is now over at www.pureandapplied.net/adrian

Ethics and sustainability in websites

After reading scenariogirls' thought-provoking post on ethics in website development I was inspired by the considerations raised there to extend my own thinking about ethics, and also about sustainability, in the online world.

In the context of work on gambling sites scenariogirl asked the excellent question that online practitioners should ask themselves more often (and I paraphrase) - is the work I'm doing ethical?

In gambling sites it would seem to me the issues are fairly clearcut - online gambling is not an ethical business for a practitioner to be engaged in. It's a business that creates significant impoverishment in some sections of the community, and one built only on the precept of taking money from the community, but providing no valuable service or product in return. Online gambling sites can't even claim to make a cheap dinner for the oldies like the clubs do!

(As a side note - while even great projects such as the Sydney Harbour Bridge, the Sydney Opera House and NSW state hospitals have been built on the proceeds of lotteries, I nonetheless think it's a terrible cost to the integrity of the NSW state government that it is so beholden to the proceeds of gambling.)

What though, I wondered, would be the questions worth asking where the case is not so clearcut. What are the ethics and sustainability issues around work for other organisations with more acceptable business models. What would make one client better to work for than another? Would it be ok for example to work at the more desirable employer Yahoo when its activities in China have seen the imprisonment of a dissident but the management has expressed contrition and a desire to do better, or what about building a website for a mining company or a bank?

Such questions are obviously complex and intriguing:

• What is an ethical online activity?
• What is a sustainable online activity?
• How can practitioners assess potential employers on these questions?
• What about an employer's offline activities?

Using a phrase 'online activity' sounds a little contorted I must admit, but I wanted to ensure the scope of my thinking is broad and includes all the inputs, processes and outputs of an organisation's online activity, and in each case ask this question: is it sustainable in all its facets, and is it ethical?

What are the ethical issues you face in your online work?

links for 2006-09-04

• Chiara Fox .com (Now with more Fox): Understanding Your Content
  "At Adaptive Path's Uxer Experience Week in Washington, DC I gave a presentation on content analysis."
  (tags: ia content)
• brandchannel.com | Professional Sports Sponsorship Problems | Branding Athletes and Professional Teams | branding and marketing portal | brand | brands | branding news
  Interesting brandchannel story on the risks of team sports sponsorship. Heard of Phonak?
  (tags: brand)
• What I've Learned in Four Years of Blogging
  Dan Saffer on blogging a lot.
  (tags: blogging tips)
• Dan Saffer // Extras
  Dan Saffer's diagrams and good stuff.
  (tags: ia id)

links for 2006-09-01

• positionrelative.com »
  Colleague Scott Parsons' blog.
  (tags: mates ia css)
• iaslash Christopher Fahey writes an interesting series on the “Smoke & Mirrors” of user research.
  
  ...the “Smoke & Mirrors” of user research...
  (tags: research ia)
  

links for 2006-08-31

• Cheatsheet: What is Digg? - Valleywag
  (tags: digg social haha)
• Webmaster Central Blog
  (tags: seo blog google)
• Socio-digital Systems
  Microsofts socio-digital design lab. Can they be cool kids at this age? Why not!
  (tags: research microsoft design social)