While this seems logical enough, many have ignored the notion of paying for usablity testing in the early stages of projects, dismissing it as nice but not critical.

Jakob Neilsen, preeminent usability guru, quantifies the benefits of usability as follows:

• "Forty years of software engineering experience uniformly indicates that it's much cheaper to change a product early in the development process than it is to make changes later. The most common estimate is that it's 100 times cheaper."
• "...So while late usability studies can add 100% to the final design's metrics, early usability can add 1000% more value."

So while earlier would have been better, it didn't happen. Nonetheless, the staggering value of usability's benefits warrants catching the usability issues on a site NOW, and bringing return on investment in line.

The information contained in a usability evaluation enables organizations to weed out firms in two ways:

1) It provides new benchmarks for scrutinizing development firm portfolios.

2) It provides a means for helping to determine which firms have the site's best interest at heart.

If a development firm embraces the concepts presented in a usability evaluation, the firm is concerned with site success, not with showcasing their own design or tech talents.

If a firm rejects the value of what is discussed in a usability evaluation, keep searching for a development firm.

But why pay the huge costs associated with this research (as much as $20,000) when the best practices of web usability have been determined, studied, published and preached?

The absence of these best practices and established guidelines can be easily detected by usability specialists such as Usability Medic at far less cost.

Additionally, usability evaluations can be turned around in less time than can usability tests.

This level of expense is generally only justifiable to companies with deep pockets.

However, the feedback mechanisms, themselves, are a distraction from the visitors' tasks and goals.

Better to employ usability guidelines into the design of the site so such mechansims are not necessary.

Visitors will still realize that the organization cares about their experience because navigating the site will be seamless and intuitive.