The Idea
My Proposal
I will conduct some UX work for you for free. You and I will negotiate, in advance, the metrics against which we will assess the value of this work to you. You will then pay me a fraction of that value.
The Challenges
The first is trust – either you have to open your books to me or I need to trust you. This will be manageable; I do not need to squeeze every penny out of my value to you for me to think ours was a good engagement.
The second is confounds – there may be various reasons for fluctuations in your metrics of interest. We can work together to estimate what percentage of the change might be due to the UX work. Or we can time the subsequent UX-based changes to identify micro-effects. This may require some creativity on our parts, but it is do-able. And I will be flexible.
The third is other stakeholders – you may have other people in your organization who are not onboard with our plan. There are many other UX professionals out there, and this approach may well not be the best for your organization.
Be Prepared for Extreme Numbers
I am talking to both you and me. My pay may end up being zero. On the other hand, in my example on the home page, if our client’s “$200,000-a-day bump in revenue” continued for a year, their benefits, for their $14,000 invested, was $73,000,000, for an ROI of 5200:1 — $5200 return for each dollar invested in UX work. In year 1.
An Example
So, let us imagine that customer support burden is your biggest concern. Here’s an example. Let’s say Company A has a product that currently has 10,000 licensees, and they make an average of five calls per month to the customer support line, and each call costs Company A $20. Thus, Company A’s product has a $1mil/month customer support burden. What if I took a month to evaluate the product’s UI, made a series of recommendations that took Company A another month to implement, and they started receiving only two calls per month per licensee, thereby reducing their monthly customer support burden to $400,000? Well, the overall burden would likely be more, because the increased usability of the product would also lead to increased sales!
Think about it, if you will . . .