Software Usability & Net Promoter Benchmarks for 2014

Many factors, including features and price, influence whether customers recommend software products. But usability consistently tops the list of key drivers of customer loyalty. Typically, usability accounts for between 30% and 60% of the “why” when customers do or don’t recommend products. A positive experience leads more customers to recommend a product. A negative experience,

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10 Things to Know About the System Usability Scale (SUS)

The System Usability Scale (SUS) is a ten-item questionnaire administered to users for measuring the perceived ease of use of software, hardware, cell phones and websites. It’s been around for more than a quarter century, and its wide usage has allowed us to study it extensively and write about it in this blog and in

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Predicting Task Completion with the System Usability Scale

Usability is attitude plus action. Attitudes and actions are measured during a usability test where a representative sample of users are asked to complete tasks. During the test we collect task-based metrics of performance (completion rates, task-time and errors) and perception (task-level difficulty). We created the Single Usability Metric (SUM) to summarize these task metrics

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Predicting Net Promoter Scores from System Usability Scale Scores

Introduced in 2003 by Fred Reichheld, the Net Promoter Score (NPS)® has become a popular metric of customer loyalty in industry. The NPS uses a single Likelihood to Recommend question (“How likely is it that you would recommend our company to a friend or colleague?”) with 11 scale steps from 0 (Not at all likely)

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How much does the usability test affect perceptions of usability?

It is one of the most important questions to ask when measuring usability. Just how much does the process of measuring impact the metrics we collect? In measuring perceived usability of five popular websites, I found that a single difficult task lowered post-test usability scores by 8%. This was largely driven by users with the

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Are both positive and negative items necessary in questionnaires?

There is a long tradition of including items in questionnaires that are phrased both positively and negatively. This website was easy to use. It was difficult to find what I needed on this website. The major reason for alternating item wording is to minimize extreme response bias and acquiescent bias. However, some recent research[pdf] Jim

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Measuring Usability with the System Usability Scale (SUS)

It is the 25th anniversary of the creation of the most used questionnaire for measuring perceptions of usability. The System Usability Scale (SUS) was released into this world by John Brooke in 1986. It was originally created as a “quick and dirty” scale for administering after usability tests on systems like VT100 Terminal (“Green-Screen”) applications.

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5 Second Usability Tests

In a few seconds what can you tell about people… or websites? Some famous research has shown that student evaluations given after only a few seconds of video[pdf]are indistinguishable from evaluations from students who actually had the professor for an entire semester! There has been some relevant research on the importance of immediate website actions

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Can You Use The SUS For Websites?

The System Usability Scale (SUS) is the most popular standardized usability questionnaire. SUS was developed about 20 years ago at Digital Equipment Corporation by John Brooke. It’s popular for two reasons: it’s free and short (at only 10 questions). The process of taking a set of ordinary questions and making it into a psychometrically valid

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Does Better Usability Increase Customer Loyalty?

Would you recommend your cell-phone to a friend?  How about the rental car company you just used?  Customer loyalty is an important attribute of a product or service’s long-term viability.  There are many ways to measure the construct of customer satisfaction and loyalty and they usually involve questionnaires, such as the American Customer Satisfaction Index

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