Planning II: Costs of UCD methods
February 3, 2009 (over a year ago)
Involving users in your design/development process doesn’t come for free. At Rightmove we use a spreadsheet outlining the costs to help us create our UCD estimates – setting realistic expectations at the beginning of a project.
What is it?
Okay, it’s just a spreadsheet. And it doesn’t even have any macros. But we find it very, very useful. It just lays out the cost in time and money for each of the UCD methods.
The columns are as follows:
- Method
- Source: Who’s involved in the test. This can be:
- Internal: We do it with internal Rightmove staff
- In-house: We do the research in-house but with real users
- Agency: We let an agency do the work for us
- Users: Number of users covered by the cost
- Cost: Includes things like the monetary incentive for users (well, vouchers)
- Days: Number of human-days involved including preparation, administration, facilitation, evaluation, and analysis
- Duration: How long it will take from beginning to end (recruiting to analysis)
Note: All prices are in GBP. And some pricings are guesstimates but it’s enough to start a conversation.
How do we use it?
When we have two recommendations and know which UCD methods we want to use for a project (using our UCD recommendation engine), we refer to this spreadsheet to work out what the costs will be. For example, say we decide we’ll need to do some paper prototyping with external users. The spreadsheet tells us this will cost:
- £300 in incentives
- 6 days of work
- over the course of 4 weeks
Download
- Costs of UCD methods (16KB Excel doc)
What next?
Given the recommendations and the costs involved we can then create our UCD estimates at the beginning of a project and start setting expectations with the project owner.