Can we save a million minutes?

Kat Husbands
Nov 7 · 6 min read

Time=money, so let’s save people’s time

I’m working my notice period at UofG and thinking about how the momentum of the last couple years might be maintained.

So far, through a range of grassroots projects, we’ve raised the University’s UX maturity from stage 0 to stage 2:

There are lots of different versions of the stages of UX maturity but none of them quite fitted UofG, so we made yet another version!

In 2017, the user experience was unrecognised, little understood or not considered important. Two years later it is often talked about, sometimes prioritised and occasionally ad-hoc funding is allocated for user research. We’re also starting to see UX being built into key job descriptions, and the World Changing Glasgow Transformation team recently hired a User Researcher, who I can’t wait to meet.

I’m so proud of this progress, and of all the people who’ve chosen or fought to work in user centred ways and brought us this far 👏👏👏

WHY save a million minutes?

To keep maturing to stage 3 and beyond, however, towards user centred design being a core part of University culture, we need senior management buy-in. Sadly we can’t convince executives to prioritise UX for its own sake, but we CAN demonstrate how investing in the user experience would contribute to their current priorities. In many cases these boil down to ‘save money’, so let’s show how giving our students and colleagues easier, less frustrating daily lives also saves the University money.

1 million staff minutes = 10.8 Full-time equivalent years = £542,894

In a previous blog post I showed how a user centred redesign of the MyGlasgow Staff landing page saved 100,000 minutes of staff time over a year. You can also think of that as £54,000 worth of productivity reclaimed, which is like giving the Uni 1.08 more FTE staff! Now if I could just get them allocated to the UX team…

This surprising and very pleasing metric gave me the idea of pooling savings from multiple projects to collectively save a million minutes. Anyone fancy setting up a totaliser? We’re at least 10% of the way there already 😃

1 million student minutes = 3.5 Honours degrees = £not sure yet

It’s trickier to link student time to money: with so many students from different backgrounds taking different types of degrees and paying different levels of fees, I can’t find a way to average their value to the University.

I’ve tried focusing instead on the reputational benefits of better UX. In many ways, the quality and quantity of next year’s intake (and therefore income) depends on how recent graduates rated their experience, so surely it’s in the University’s best interest for students to feel that their time is respected and they’re not just part of a captive audience whose day-to-day experience doesn’t matter once we’ve got them registered. Suggestions welcome on how to quantify that!

Now, assuming you’re on board with the literal cash value of saving people’s time:

WHAT is a million minutes?

(10,000 people) x (1 task taking 5mins longer than it needs to) x (20 times a year) = 1 million minutes wasted

There are many ways to clock up potential time savings. The key is for at least 1 of the following to be very high:

  • Number of people who do the thing
  • How many times a year they do it
  • Difference between how many minutes it takes to do now and how many it would take if simplified

The made-up example in the image above could represent a task that all postgrads have to do weekly during the semester — not much of a stretch of imagination.

With the MyGlasgow Staff landing page, the key was how often it’s used — 1.4 million times a year— so saving just a few seconds per visit had a huge impact.

With a current project to improve the macOS printing set up process, the key is the massive 7.5 minutes per set-up we should be able to save.

With Moodle there are two keys: almost 30,000 students and staff have to use it almost every day of the semester, so there’s loads of potential for small time savings to add up.

HOW to save a million minutes

Think about what services you deliver to students or staff: what tasks do you help them to complete? This can be via systems, webpages, documents, in-person or some other way.

Now think about what you can reliably measure to get before/after data: which of your services is used by the most people? Which is used the most often? And which takes the longest?

If there are a few different places where you could save a good chunk of time, start with the one that’s easiest to prove.

You don’t need to make everything perfect in one go! Even if that was possible, it wouldn’t last because people and technology and environments are constantly changing. Instead aim for continuous improvement.

Do a bit of user research (guided by the UX Framework if needed), make a couple of changes based on your findings, measure, and see what happens. Then do a bit more…

“Doing any [user] testing is better than doing none at all, as long as you recognise that your results might not be perfect. If you start doing even a little bit you’ll quickly see the value and it will encourage you — and others — to do more.”
Paul Boag

Some tips and inspiration:

Celebrate your successes. If something’s gone well, go public! How much time did you save, what’s that worth in £££, and how did you achieve it? And if you find out things about your users that surprise you, use them as conversation starters.

Aim to engage and excite executives (saved time = saved money!) but also to spread best practice and inspire others to give it a try.

Share your failures too, so others can avoid the pitfalls.

Take every opportunity to tell your users’ stories, to help others put themselves in the shoes of the people whose time they can save with data-led decisions.

Can we save a million minutes?

Yes, I firmly believe that collectively we can, in fact I had it as a PDR objective! But it turns out I won’t be here much longer (more on that soon) so I can’t build this into as much of a Thing as I’d hoped. If you’re interested in picking up the baton, or just starting to talk about the idea of focusing on saving people’s time, join the UX & user focused chat group on Yammer.

Over to you.


University of Glasgow students and staff: want to take part in user research to improve the websites and systems you use everyday? Join the MyGlasgow User Panel!

UofG UX

Piloting user experience research, design and testing methods at the University of Glasgow

Kat Husbands

Written by

User experience advocate, digital content wrangler, fishkeeper, AFOL.

UofG UX

UofG UX

Piloting user experience research, design and testing methods at the University of Glasgow

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