The Business Case of HCI.

Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) has been in existence almost as long as the discipline of soft-ware engineering. Yet HCI is still perceived in in-dustry as a cost factor or a "nice to have" and more marginal than other software engineering activities (Bias and Mayhew, 1994). Companies often look for an HCI "rubber stamp" to assure themselves that their product is usable but are still resistant to involving HCI at all stages of development. This has been the same throughout the history of HCI. Why is it that HCI has matured as a discipline but has made little in roads into being accepted as mainstream in the industrial process of develop-ment? Why is it so easy to ignore or sideline HCI as something that is nice to have if the budget can stretch to it? Can we, as HCI practitioners, justify our existence in the commercial business model of a company? It would appear that, as a discipline HCI still lacks a way of marketing itself as an es-sential asset for the business community. The success of a business is largely dependent on the efficiency and effectiveness of its operation. Its language is bottom line profit. HCI can easily be perceived as too complex, expensive and time con-suming (Nielsen, 1994) to be economically viable. For example, the successful integration of a fully fledged HCI process into the Australian Telstra’s GUI development methodology several years ago (Lindgaard, 1996) was ruthlessly scrapped once the organisation decided to outsource all its software development and the top manager who had been the Human Factors advocate on the Board of Directors left the company (Lindgaard, 2001). Despite having produced data clearly demonstrating that the usabil-ity problems associated with one core system alone cost the company a cool annual $30 million, the HCI program evidently fell into the category of unnecessary ‘fluff’. In a software development project, the tangible costs of developing systems are accounted for with little thought of any subsequent costs that may be incurred beyond the project's closure. These often counterbalance the cost of the HCI activities. Good usability can be translated into reduced training costs, increased productivity, reduced cus-tomer support costs, higher customer satisfaction, a more positive brand image, and, ultimately, higher profits. These factors have graced many a business justification for carrying out HCI activities. How-ever, published evidence of this operationally is sparse. One such example is Xerox's success in integrating industrial design and HCI, which changed their losses into a recovery worth over $1 billion (Wasserman, 1989). There are undoubtedly other success stories attributed to HCI out there but they are hard to find. A successful 1-day workshop on this topic was conducted at CHI 2002 (Lindgaard & Millard, 2002). We want to build on its results and move