When I started systematically measuring website usability over 10 years ago I started with the SUS as a key metric. The System Usability Scale (SUS) was the natural questionnaire to start with. It was then, as it is now, a popular 10-item questionnaire to measure the perceived usability of interfaces. It’s been around for over
Positive word of mouth is a critical driver of future growth for consumer software products. Along with features and capabilities, user experience is a key determinant of how likely users adopt new technology and recommend software. We’ve found that usability accounts for between 30% and 60% of the variation in Net Promoter Scores. A positive
Despite the attention consumer-based mobile apps, websites, and software get, a lot of the world depends on business software. Business software supports core functions for organizations such as productivity tasks, communication, accounting, and sales. Along with features and capabilities, the user experience of software is a key determinant of how likely users adopt new technology
Questionnaires are an effective way for gauging sentiments toward constructs like usability, loyalty, and the quality of the website user experience. A standardized questionnaire is one that has gone through psychometric validation. That means the items used in the questionnaire have been shown to: 1. Offer consistent responses (reliability) 2. Measure what they are intended
The System Usability Scale (SUS) is the most used questionnaire to measure perceptions of usability. It was developed 30 years ago by John Brooke. I had the fortune to meet with John in person last month in London. We talked about his motivation and process for creating the now famous “quick and dirty” questionnaire. John
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
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
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)
Many software companies track and use the Net Promoter Score as a gauge of customer loyalty. Positive word of mouth is a critical driver of future growth. If you have a usable product, customers will tell their friends about the positive experience. And alternatively, a poor user experience will lead customers to tell their friends
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
