The SUS (System Usability Scale) is a survey that can be used either independently to understand how your site ranks in the eyes of users, or in addition to the task based usability testing discussed in Tip #97. The SUS offers a standard for measuring how easy (or difficult) it is to use your site, according to the user.
Speaker: So as we are continuing to kind of wrap up here, again, I want to share some more thoughts with you around some ways that you can actually kind of figure out your own usability and some of the things that you’ve been doing. Obviously, one of the first things we talked about was testing your users. Well, one of the ways that you can test your users; sometimes you don’t have the ability to do any full fledge usability testing. Sometimes, the survey can be equally, well definitely not equally, but it can definitely help out. There is one that was actually put together a long time ago called the system usability scale. Basically, what this cosis is that it allows us to look at some basic metrics. This has been proven and there have been a lot of studies over time, to kind of see how people react to a particular system. So, you can see some of the examples of the questions here. Here are actually the 10 questions that get asked including I think that I would like to use this system frequently, I thought there was too much inconsistency in the system, and I found the system very cumbersome to use. I mean, there are a lot of different answers otherwise about how people feel about this, which again, is actually a very important metric component for usability. You can see that what you have people do is you have them rate 1-5 and stuff like that.
What does this give us? Well, when we actually look, this is an actual report for one of our clients that we have in front of here, you can actually see that you are looking at it and there is a possible of 100 points here with the average being right around 68 and this organization actually hit around 49 points. So, what can you take away from that? The important thing is that overall this can give you some kind of metric, not only to maybe that there are issues in your system and that you do need to do further studies. So, if you have a situation where nobody wants you to do any usability, this can be a great way of showing that you need to. You can also gain some understanding of just how much the users are actually accepting what you currently have.
More About Virgil
Virgil Carroll is the owner and president of High Monkey – based in Minneapolis Minnesota. Virgil also wears the multiple ‘hats’ of Principle Human Solutions Architect and SharePoint Architect.
Virgil is one of those rare individuals who can dive deep into technical topics while speaking clearly to the business owners of a project and never forgetting that the end user experience has the highest priority. He calls it using both sides of his brain. Virgil is passionate about leveraging technologies ‘out of the box’ as much as possible with a focus on the strategic use of content to create websites that deliver the right content to the right audience on the right device at the right time. Virgil brings high energy, an ironic wit, and a sense of grounded perspective whenever he speaks to an audience. Virgil regularly speaks at conferences and user groups throughout the United States and occasionally in Europe.