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Designing for the Bottom Line (Web Techniques, Dec 2001)
"The easiest ROI arguments are those that come with dollar figures attached, often referred to as hard ROI. For example, when IBM carried out a wholesale redesign of the IBM.com site in 1999, online sales rose by 400 percent the following week. That's easy math."
In these increasingly troubled times, we are forced more than ever before to justify ourselves. it's time for us to learn from usability and figure out how to fight with numbers. After all, if usability says "sales improved 400% by fixing usability problems" the odds are good the information architecture was altered (as well as interface design, etc.) A little backtracking of cases in old copies of Interact, a thorough read of Cost Justifying Usability and we should be able to say, once the information architecture was restructured, customer service calls were reduced by 50%, resulting in a net savings or 40,000 in a two month period. or something like that.
p.s. Pay close attention to our e-commerce whitepapers if you want some clues. :)