Despite the attention consumer-level mobile apps, websites, and software get, much of the world depends on business software. Business software supports core functions for organizations, such as productivity management, communication, accounting, and sales. Several products also have a fair amount of crossover between business and consumer usage. Along with their features and capabilities, the user
Near the top of the list of concerns people have when using statistics with UX data is what to do with non-normal data. If you remember only a few things from statistics class, you might recall something about data needing to look like the infamous bell curve; more specifically, it needs to be normally distributed.
If you took an intro to stats class (or if you know just enough to be dangerous), you probably recall two things: something about Mark Twain’s “lies, damned lies …,” and that your data needs to be normally distributed. Turns out both are only partly true. Mark Twain did write the famous quote, but he
The seven-point Single Ease Question (SEQ®) has become a standard in assessing post-task perceptions of ease. We developed the SEQ over a decade ago after our research showed it performed comparably to or better than other single-item measures. It is an extension of an earlier five-point version that Tedesco and Tullis (2006 [PDF]) found performed best
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
The System Usability Scale (SUS) has been used in industrial user experience research since the mid-1980s. Despite its age, the SUS is still a popular measure, widely used in benchmark tests of software products to measure perceived usability. One reason for its popularity is the extent to which its measurement properties have been comprehensively studied
In Quantifying the User Experience, we recommend using a mix of task-level and study-level metrics, especially in benchmarking studies. But what, exactly, are task-level and study-level metrics, how do they differ, and why should you collect them both? In this article, we’ll explore this common practice of collecting both types of metrics to understand the
Despite its age and the availability of other UX measures such as the UX-Lite™ and SUPR-Q®, the ten-item System Usability Scale (SUS) is still a very popular measure. It’s used widely in benchmark tests of software products to generate an overall score of perceived usability. We regularly collect SUS scores for dozens of consumer and
In a previous article, we described three ways to estimate SUS scores from UX-Lite™ (and UMUX-Lite) scores, using either both items (perceived measures of Ease and Usefulness) or the Ease item only: Two-item interpolation: Scaling the mean of both items to a 100-point scale (Lite). One-item interpolation: Scaling just the Ease item to a 100-point
Individual differences in behavior and attitude often overshadow the differences in designs. There are many ways to characterize how people differ. But one characteristic that drives both attitudinal and behavioral UX metrics is prior experience. Beyond the more superficial aspects of demographic variables such as age, gender, income, and geography, a person’s experience with an
