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Is the SUS Too Antiquated?

The System Usability Scale (SUS) is one of the oldest standardized UX questionnaires. John Brooke is now retired; should the questionnaire he developed almost 40 years ago accompany him on the beach with a piña colada? After all, the SUS was developed when there were green-screen computer monitors. How can it possibly apply to mobile

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A Primer on Biases and Errors in Survey Design

In 1916, a leading periodical called The Literary Digest polled its large subscriber base of hundreds of thousands of readers and successfully predicted the winner of that year’s presidential election. The magazine repeated the poll in 1920, 1924, 1928, and 1932, correctly predicting the winner each time—five successful election predictions in a row. In 1936,

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Foundations of Survey Design in UX Research

In a typical week, we are asked to complete surveys on everything: our most recent restaurant experience, our interaction with an airline’s customer service department, and our recollection of our last online purchase, to name just a few. Surveys are ubiquitous. Not surprisingly, many people hold strong opinions about their proper usage in applied research

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Validating a Tech Savviness Metric for UX Research

Some participants in usability studies complete a task effortlessly, while others struggle with the same task. In retrospective UX surveys, some respondents report having an easy time using a website and strongly recommend it to others, but others report having a much poorer website experience. Why? What explains the discrepancy between experiences, especially when the

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How to Use the Finite Population Correction

What is the impact if you sample a lot of your population in a survey? Many statistical calculations—for example, confidence intervals, statistical comparisons (e.g., the two-sample t-test), and their sample size estimates—assume that your sample is a tiny fraction of your population. But what if you have a relatively modest population size (e.g., IT decision-makers

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A Taxonomy of Common UX Research Methods

User experience research has a wide variety of methods. From one perspective, it’s good because there’s usually a method for whatever research question you need to answer. On the other hand, it’s hard to keep track of all these methods. Some methods, such as usability testing, are commonly used and have been around for decades.

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Does Changing the Number of Response Options Affect Rating Behavior?

Changing the number of response options in the survey might confuse participants. Over the years, we’ve heard variations on this concern articulated a number of different ways by clients and fellow researchers. Surveys and unmoderated UX studies commonly contain a mix of five-, seven-, and eleven-point scales. That leads some to express concern. Why are

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Sample Sizes for Comparing SUS Scores

Microsoft Word is a widely used word processing program, part of the Microsoft Office suite of programs. While its dominance has been challenged recently by Google Docs, Word still leads on the features list, providing many features that Google’s offering lacks. But adding features can also add to bloat, making common tasks harder as users

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UX-Lite Usefulness Update

Can an experience be useful without meeting your needs? The UX-Lite™ is a new questionnaire that evolved from the SUS and the UMUX-Lite. It has only two items, one measuring perceived Ease and one measuring perceived Usefulness, as shown in Figure 1. Because the verbal complexity of the original Usefulness item stands in stark contrast

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