DIY SUS Package

System Usability Scale

A package of tools for Designers, Agencies, and Companies keen to improve their user's experience.

For Agencies

• Regardless of the size of your agency, you can add this as a line item in your service offerings and immediately start providing value to your clients!
• This method can be used as soon as you have a product to test, even during a competitive analysis you can use it to test the usability of your client's competitors!

For Companies

• If you're an in-house designer starting a big redesign of a legacy product, use this method to establish a baseline of the system's usability so later on you can show the impact your amazing designs had on real-world business metrics!
• If you are in Product, Management, Marketing or QA, this is a great tool to use to track the usability of a product

Why do a SUS survey?

Here’s what Usability.gov has to say:

The System Usability Scale (SUS) provides a “quick and dirty”, reliable tool for measuring usability.   It consists of a 10-item questionnaire with five response options for respondents; from Strongly agree to Strongly disagree.  Originally created by John Brooke in 1986, it allows you to evaluate a wide variety of products and services, including hardware, software, mobile devices, websites, and applications.

Benefits of using a SUS

SUS has become an industry standard, with references in over 1300 articles and publications.  The noted benefits of using SUS include that it:

• Is a very easy scale to administer to participants
• Can be used on small sample sizes with reliable results (!)
• Is valid – it can effectively differentiate between usable and unusable systems

💡 In my personal experience, when senior stakeholders see the scores from a SUS, they have no trouble understanding or accepting them at face value. This has been incredibly helpful for me when trying to show stakeholders how good or bad the usability of a system is. It’s also helpful to establish a baseline or benchmark at the beginning of a redesign which can be great for comparing after each iteration of the product or prototype all the way to the final version!