System usability scale

We've got to know, where does this metric come from? What standardizes it? What does it measure? How do we know it's reliable? Does this metric continue to mean the same thing in different situations? Today, I'm excited to share a conversation I had with Phil Kortum, who I'll introduce momentarily.

Together, we'll explore the System Usability Scale, or SUS, with questions like...

Why has this 10-item questionnaire survived for more than four decades? How does it compare to something like the Net Promoter Score? Why is it that asking several questions produces a better measure than simply asking one? How do we know what SUS scores like 50, 70, or 90 actually mean? When can researchers modify the scale without undermining it? And with the SUS, we're asking people questions.

So isn't that subjective? How is it that the SUS ultimately gives us an objective value? By the end of this conversation, you'll have a much clearer understanding of what it means to measure usability well and why good measurement can give designers a common language for not just talking about but understanding the human experience.

He focuses on human factors, usability measurement, and applied psychology, known for bridging the rigorous side of usability with real-world applications of product and system usability.

He has co-authored a bunch of really important research papers in the field, namely...

An Empirical Evaluation of System Usability Scale, SUS.

And so we'll be talking about that 2008 paper and a bunch of others.