Articles by Jeff Sauro, PhD

Mr. Sauro is a six-sigma trained statistical analyst and founding principal of MeasuringU, a customer experience research firm based in Denver. He has conducted usability tests and statistical analysis for companies such as Google, eBay, Walmart, Autodesk, Lenovo, and Dropbox, and has published over 20 peer-reviewed research articles and 5 books, including Customer Analytics for Dummies.

Comparison of Select-All-That-Apply Items with Yes/No Forced Choice Items

Abstract Prior research has suggested that people tend to select more items when presented with a forced choice (yes/no) format than with a select-all-that-apply (SATA) format, and some have argued against ever using SATA in research. We review findings from previous research and report the results of new studies comparing a standard SATA grid format […] [Read More]

Item Benchmarks for the System Usability Scale

Abstract From humble beginnings, the SUS has become a valuable tool in the toolkits of usability and user experience practitioners and researchers. We have developed regression equations that compute benchmarks for SUS items based on an overall SUS score. A review of the SUS literature on published benchmarks for the means of overall SUS scores […] [Read More]

SUPR-Qm: A Questionnaire to Measure the Mobile App User Experience

Abstract In this paper, we present the SUPR-Qm, a 16-item instrument that assesses a user’s experience of a mobile application. Rasch analysis was used to assess the psychometric properties of items collected from four independent surveys (N = 1,046) with ratings on 174 unique apps. For the final instrument, estimates of internal consistency reliability were […] [Read More]

Can I Leave This One Out? The Effect of Dropping an Item From the SUS

Abstract There are times when user experience practitioners might consider using the System Usability Scale (SUS), but there is an item that just doesn’t work in their context of measurement. For example, the first item is “I think I would like to use this system frequently.” If the system under study is one that would […] [Read More]

Revisiting the Factor Structure of the System Usability Scale

Abstract In 2009, we published a paper in which we showed how three independent sources of data indicated that, rather than being a unidimensional measure of perceived usability, the System Usability Scale apparently had two factors: Usability (all items except 4 and 10) and Learnability (Items 4 and 10). In that paper, we called for […] [Read More]