We are delighted to publish an editorial by Susan Hura titled “Usability Testing of
Spoken Conversational Systems.” She provides valuable insights around the evaluation
of voice interface systems. She describes specific issues around evaluating voice
interfaces that are in an early stage of development, such as the use of “Wizard of Oz”
testing. Her comprehensive review of the evaluation of voice interface systems gives
usability practitioners a valuable set of guidelines for evaluation and design.
The first article is by Stephanie Linek titled “Order Effects in Usability Questionnaires.”
In this article she investigates possible order effects for the arrangement of various
components of a usability questionnaire. She explores how the presentation order of
different parts of a usability questionnaire, for a website home page and its various
services, may impact results, specifically the possibility of a “halo effect.” These findings
have direct implications for practitioners who utilize usability questionnaires.
The second article by Jim Lewis and Jeff Sauro is titled “Revisiting the Factor Structure
of the System Usability Scale.” They explore whether the System Usability Scale (SUS)
has two distinct dimensions: usability and learnability, or whether there is a single
unidimensional measure of usability. The results of analyzing more than 9,000 SUS
questionnaires provide strong evidence on how usability practitioners should be
interpreting the results from the SUS questionnaire.
The third article by Fatih Demir and colleagues is titled “A Next-Generation Augmented
Reality Platform for Mass Casualty Incidents (MCI).” They evaluate the usability of a
new system based on the Internet of Things (IoT) for first responders and incident
commanders to use during a mass casualty incident. The results from this study may be
broadly applicable in the usability and design of augmented reality platforms.
