Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox: April 4, 1999
Assumptions for Productivity Calculation
Sidebar to Jakob Nielsen 's column on intranet portals .
Let's make the following assumptions:
- all employees spend 5 seconds more than necessary to ponder the headline because it is not sufficiently communicative
- the poorly written headline causes 10% of employees to click on the headline even though the story is useless to them
- people spend 30 seconds on average reading the story before they decide to back out because it's useless
- the company has 10,000 employees using the intranet
- the value of an employee's time is $50/hour (note that the value of an employee's time should be much more than their salary ; not just to account for benefits and overhead but also to contribute to the company's bottom line)
See also 110-page report on the return on investment (ROI) for usability .