Consumers are delighted by digital experiences that are effective,
easy to use, and make the customer feel good. ... Firms face an expanding
ecosystem of technology supporting digital customer experiences, and they
are falling behind on making innovative use of the technologies that will
provide continuously evolving experiences in the age of the customer.
-- Forester Research 2015
1
Usability Untested
When usability is untested, it might lead to such atrocities as the following signs.
CC: Attribution 2.0 Generic
CC: Attribution 2.0 Generic
The Importance of Usability Testing
Forrester Research once reported, "Fortune 1000 companies each spend an average of $2 million per year on site redesigns, without knowing if the redesign made the site easier to use." 2 If user issues are not fixed until an application goes into development, these issues cost 10x more to remediate. If one waits until a system is in production, these issues cost 100x more! (See The ROI of Usability).
Usability Scoring
In 1986, John Brooke from Digital Equipment Corporation (now HP) devised a simple usability scoring mechanism called the System Usability Scalethat has been in place for many years. The following readings will acquaint you with usability scoring and analysis:
- SUS - A quick and dirty usability scale
- John Brooke explains the System Usability Scale.
- A Comparison of Questionnaires for Assessing Website Usability
- In 2004, a project conducted by Fidelity Investments compared the SUS to other usability scoring methodologies: University of Maryland's QUIS, IBM's CSUQ, a variation of Microsoft's Product Reaction Cards, and their own in-house tool.
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Determining What Individual SUS Scores Mean:
Adding an Adjective Rating Scale. - In 2009, researchers at AT&T and Rice University added a final question to the SUS (an adjective rating) to see how well this singe question would correlate to the SUS score.
- The Effect of Experience on System Usability Scale Ratings
- In 2012, McLellan, et.al., ran a study to see what the effect of user experience would have on the perception of usability as measured by SUS scores.
- SUS: A retrospective
- Finally, in 2013, John Brooke revisited SUS more than 25 years after it was developed. Learn about the process of its development, and what Brooke's new perspectives are.