MeasuringU: All Articles

Ten Things to Know about the RITE Method

By Jim Lewis, PhD and Jeff Sauro, PhD . March 31, 2020 . Tags: RITE, Formative testing

If you have the budget and time to test with fifteen users, it’s better to break up those fifteen into three groups and make changes between rounds than test all fifteen in one round before making any changes. When you see a user struggle to complete a task because of a poorly labeled field or a hidden menu, it can be a waste of time,

Is Usability Testing Effective?

By Jim Lewis, PhD and Jeff Sauro, PhD . March 24, 2020 . Tags: CUE, Reliability, Validity

Questioning the effectiveness of usability testing may sound like a relic from the past. In the early years of industrial usability engineering, there was a constant need to justify the activity of (and your job in) usability testing. The book Cost-Justifying Usability (Bias & Mayhew, 2005) speaks to this. Usability testing has since gained significant adoption in organizations. But that doesn’t mean some of the

What’s the Difference Between Pragmatic and Hedonic Usability?

By Jim Lewis, PhD and Jeff Sauro, PhD . March 17, 2020 . Tags: Hedonic usability, AttrakDiff2, UEQ, meCUE2.0

Is a usable experience sufficient for a good experience? Assuming a product, website, or app does what it intends to do and is usable, is there anything more? Usability testing tends to focus on the objective task-oriented performance quality of an experience. What about aspects such as innovativeness, originality, or beauty? Do these matter? If so, how should they be measured? We recently wrote about

Does the Von Restorff Effect Influence User Preference?

By Jeff Sauro, PhD and Jim Lewis, PhD . March 10, 2020 . Tags: Unmoderated Research, Questionnaires, Rating Scale

One of these things is not like the other. That’s the theme of a segment on the long-running US TV show Sesame Street. As children, we learn to identify similarities and differences. And after seeing a group of things that look similar, we tend to remember the differences. Why? Well, one theory describes something called the isolation effect, or the Von Restorff effect. The name

Three Questionnaires for Measuring Voice Interaction Experiences

By Jim Lewis, PhD and Jeff Sauro, PhD . March 3, 2020 . Tags: Voice Interaction, Rating Scales, Customer Experience, Questionnaire

Human: Computer, can you recognize speech? Computer: I think you said, can you wreck a nice beach? Both the quality of synthesized speech and the capability of communicating with a computer using your voice have come a long way since the debut of this technology in the 1970s. One of the most famous synthetic voices was the one used by Stephen Hawking. Some of its

8 Manipulations of the Net Promoter Score: Which Ones Matter?

By Jeff Sauro, PhD and Jim Lewis, PhD . February 23, 2020 . Tags: Net Promoter Score, Satisfaction, NPS, Customer Experience

There’s no shortage of opinions about the Net Promoter Score. There’s nothing wrong with an opinion. It’s just better when there’s data backing it. Unfortunately, when it comes to opinions about the Net Promoter Score, especially how the underlying question is displayed, the opinions are often based on anecdotes and out-of-context “best practices.” At MeasuringU, we want to help others use data to form better

10 Things to Know about the Microsoft Desirability Toolkit

By Jim Lewis, PhD and Jeff Sauro, PhD . February 18, 2020 . Tags: Desirability, Microsoft Desirability Toolkit, Validity

Who, as a person, doesn’t want to be desirable? And if you’re in the business of developing products or services, who doesn’t want those to be desirable? There is a deep satisfaction beyond the monetary rewards of providing something that people want (and of course, the money’s nice, too). While we’ve found wide interest in wanting to conduct “desirability testing,” there is much less agreement

Three Goals of Usability Testing

By Jim Lewis, PhD and Jeff Sauro, PhD . February 11, 2020 . Tags: Questionnaires, Benchmarking, Usability Testing

The fundamental goal of usability testing is to produce highly usable products and services. That’s an uncontroversial statement. Where things can get a bit confusing is how different approaches to usability testing have different ways of achieving that goal. In earlier articles we have described the different types of usability tests but many types still share common goals. In this article, we’ll first revisit the

Cultural Effects on Rating Scales

By Jeff Sauro, PhD . February 4, 2020 . Tags: LTR, Satisfaction, SEQ

Numbers are universally understood across cultures, geography, and languages. But when those numbers are applied to sentiments (for example, satisfaction, agreement, or intention), do people respond universally or does a 4 on a five-point scale elicit different reactions based on culture or geography? Many international organizations use similar sets of measures (such as satisfaction or the Net Promoter Score) to compare countries and regions. If

Three Branches of Standardized UX Measurement

By Jim Lewis, PhD and Jeff Sauro, PhD . January 28, 2020 . Tags: TAM, SUPR-Q, Questionnaires, User Research, SUS

We write extensively about standardized UX metrics such as the SUS, PSSUQ, and SUPR-Q. The main benefits of standardization include improved reliability, validity, sensitivity, objectivity, quantification, economy, communication, and norms. Even when standardized UX questionnaires are developed independently, they are influenced by earlier work, just like how UX itself is a new field built upon earlier fields. The deep roots of questionnaire development date back over