Blogs

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

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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

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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

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In our earlier article, Jim Lewis and I reviewed the published literature on labeling scales. Despite some recommendations and “best practice” wisdom, we didn’t find that fully labeled scales were measurably superior to partially labeled scales across the 17 published studies that we read. In reviewing the studies in more detail, we found many had confounding effects when comparing between full labeling and partial labeling—meaning

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Each January millions of people make New Year’s resolutions. One of the most popular is to lose weight and stay in shape. Gyms get packed each January, then around Valentine’s Day the “resolutionary” crowds tend to fade away. It’s not easy to change habits but several websites try to help you build the right fitness habits throughout the year. It can be hard enough to

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To have a reliable and valid response scale, people need to understand what they’re responding to. A poorly worded question, an unclear response item, or an inadequate response scale can create additional error in measurement. Worse yet, the error may be systematic rather than random, so it would result in unmodeled bias rather than just increased measurement variability. Rating scales have many forms, with variations

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Happy new year from all of us at MeasuringU! In 2019 we posted 46 new articles and added significant new features to MUIQ—our UX testing platform—including think-aloud videos with picture in picture and an advanced UX metrics dashboard. We hosted our seventh UX Measurement Bootcamp, and MeasuringU Press published Jim Lewis’s book, Using the PSSUQ and CSUQ in User Experience Research and Practice. The topics

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We’ve written extensively about the System Usability Scale (SUS). It’s the most widely used and cited questionnaire for measuring the perception of the user experience. But likely the second most widely used and cited questionnaire, with over 2,000 citations, is the Post Study System Usability Questionnaire (PSSUQ). It also goes by the name of Computer System Usability Questionnaire (CSUQ). MeasuringU Press is proud to have

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Question wording in a survey can impact responses. That shouldn’t be much of a surprise. Ask a different question and you’ll get a different answer. But just how different the response ends up being depends on how a question has changed. Subtle differences can have big impacts; alternatively, large differences can have little impact. It’s hard to predict the type and size of impact on

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Over half of U.S. households have a pet. And for many people, they are more than pets; they are family. But pets are also a big business. It’s estimated that pet related products and services account for $70BB annually in the U.S. alone. And a lot of that spending happens online. To better understand the pet website user experience, we conducted two studies. The first

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