System Usability Scale (SUS) – Measuring Usability Perceptions by “Sussing it Out”…

Recently,I had an opportunity to attend CHI 2011 (Computer Human Interaction Conference) in beautiful Vancouver, BC.  Amidst the various panel discussions, academic presentations and technology briefings, there was an interesting session that caught my eye entitled “Practical Statistics for User Research”. The presenters were James Lewis, PhD and Jeff Sauro, a Six-Sigma trained statistical analyst and pioneer in quantifying the user-experience.  What could’ve been a very dry, boring, and not so relevant presentation turned out to be a session that was invigorating and very pertinent to anyone who is interested in improving software usability – especially from a statistical/quantitative and PRAGMATIC perspective. 

The cornerstone issue facing a lot of usability practitioners is the ability to gather enough data or have a population that is significant to make an assessment of the usability of a software interface or system.  Lewis and Sauro presented a session on the fundamentals of statistics (e. g. your basic 20 minute stats intro, then quickly segued into a discussion on the practicalities of working with small sample uncertainty (confidence levels), and a dive into comparing two completion rates).  What I found is that they (and in particular Sauro) made the content very pertinent to software usability and testing thereof, with easy to following examples, well-constructed visuals and diagrams.  And they provided this information in the context that you can never have enough data – thus the need for these various techniques.   

So of course, in addition to my post grad readings and writings on the question of ERP usability and related metrics, I purchased their book and the related software templates and am now digging into System Usability Scale (SUS) and beginning to map these various statistical tests to the Winshuttle logs and SAP logs to help us to better ascertain the data that we have captured.  Our goal is to create confidence factors for each of the transactions,so as we work on various business value assessments with our clients we can factor the confidence information into the overall assessment choices.  The goal is to provide the best possible data for SAP process improvement candidate choice. 

Stay tuned as I will be spending the next few weeks diving into this process and reporting back the initial findings.  Until then…keep on “sussing”! 

For more information on Jeff and his work check out www.measuringusability.com.