SUS: How to Easily Grade Your Siteâs Usability
Published on November 27, 2009 (⻠February 5, 2024), filed under Design (RSS feed for all categories).
This and many other posts are also available as a pretty, well-behaved ebook: On Web Development.
The System Usability Scale (SUS) is a Likert scale-based questionnaire to grade the usability of systems, which John Brooke created back in the 80s. SUS results yield a score between 0 and 100, with 100 indicating âbestâ usability.
Now, since websites can be considered âsystems,â SUS can also be used to grade websites (âWUSâ). And hereâs a way how you can easily set up, use, and benefit from that. Grab the Website Usability Scale spreadsheet, make a copy of it through your own Google account, and use the new form to ask your own users a few questions.
Thatâs the short version. Hereâs a more comprehensive how-to:
- Log in to your Google account, for the questionnaire templates are based on Google Docs.
- Open your preferred SUS templateâeither take the original System Usability Scale template, or the customized Website Usability Scale template, which talks about âwebsites,â not âsystems.â
- In the top left, select âFileâ.
- Then, choose âMake a copyâŠâ.
- Keep or change the name of the copy.
- Remove the first line in the spreadsheet which only contains dummy data:
- Right-click on the row number, â2â, which should select the whole row and also display a context menu.
- Select âDelete rowâ.
- In the file menu at the top, go to âForm (0)â.
- Choose âGo to live formâ.
- VoilĂ âyou should now see the form you can ask to fill out: send them the URL, link the survey form from your site, whatever you prefer.
- Youâll see the results appear in your SUS spreadsheet copy; on âSheet2â, the spreadsheet automatically calculates the SUS score. As noted before, the closer the number gets to 100, the better.
Feel free to ping me in case there are any issues (as of a few years later it appears that anonymous sharing only allows for downloading).
Please note that neither SUS nor WUS is a substitute for user testing. It is more of a low cost method to evaluate usability, and to put some number on it. That it doesnât get used more frequently, considering its age, beats me, but is exactly the motivation for me to point to it, and to make it easier to implement.
Whether SUS can be used as a standard evaluation tool for websites, however, stands and falls with its adoptionâyour testsâas well as more testing and feedback from usability professionals. I have some experience when it comes to usability research, testing, and evaluation, but my core domain is still something else. With this as the closing remark, try SUS and please share your thoughts and findings.
If youâve got a minute, please also take a quick survey rating meiert.com.
Update (March 4, 2010)
Luis Guilherme created a Portuguese spreadsheet template for SUS. Very cool!
About Me
Iâm Jens (long: Jens Oliver Meiert), and Iâm a frontend engineering leader and tech author/publisher. Iâve worked as a technical lead for companies like Google and as an engineering manager for companies like Miro, Iâm somewhat close to W3C and WHATWG, and I write and review books for OâReilly and Frontend Dogma.
I love trying things, not only in web development (and engineering management), but also in other areas like philosophy. Here on meiert.com I share some of my views and experiences.
If youâd like to do me a favor, interpret charitably (I speak three languages, and they do collide), yet be critical and give feedback, so that I can make improvements. Thank you!
Comments (Closed)
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On December 1, 2009, 15:54 CET, website laten maken said:
This sounds quite interesting. I never heard of this before, but I will definitely try and read more about this!
Filled in the rating for your site đ
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On December 1, 2009, 23:20 CET, Dave said:
Very cool template. Iâm not currently able to survey my users in this way, but the SUS/WUS questions are good food for thought about whether my site is meeting their needs.
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On December 6, 2009, 18:39 CET, Mike Johnson said:
This is awesome. Thanks for posting. Looking forward to using this.
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On April 19, 2010, 19:26 CEST, Jens Oliver Meiert said:
Very brief: HFI with a take on SUS in their newsletter.
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