With any kind of product, the basic goal of it is to get users to use it. This can be seen pretty clearly with e-commerce websites: the more people use it, the more the company behind it gains from it.
But the same principle can be applied to any other kind of website or software product in general. In case of a social network, you want as many people as possible to use it, because you can collect data from users and show them advertisements, and in the end this all will convert into bigger profits for the company.
A similar point of view can be used for intranet software: the easier it is to use, the greater the productivity of the employees will be. And this means more production and efficiency, and in the end again higher profit.
Ease of use doesn't come from wishful thinking. It comes from conducting systematic usability engineering activities throughout the project lifecycle.
While an initial effort on creating a good user experience from the beginning of a project is of course important, it's not enough to ensure that the product will be effective and easy to use.
One of the most important and consolidated ways of achieving usability is conducting a UX Heuristic Evaluation of the product.
Heuristic Evaluation is done by letting one (or better, a few) examiner(s) analyze the interface on his/their own. In most cases it's better to have more than one examiner or evaluator, because one person alone will not see all of the usability problems in a product. At the same time it's extremely unlikely that different people will find the same problems in the product while working on their own.
In his article "Return on Investment for Usability", Jakob Nielsen found incredible benefits in improving the usability through an engineering process such UX Heuristic Evaluation.
| Metric | Average Improvement Across Web Projects |
|---|---|
| Sales / conversion rate | 100% |
| Traffic / visitor count | 150% |
| User performance / productivity | 161% |
| Use of specific (target) features | 202% |
This data pretty much speaks for itself. With an average investment of about 10% of the project budget, it's possible to see a substantial increase in the usability of the product, and as I explained in the first section of this paper The importance of usability, the more people use the product, the bigger the usability return on investment.