Validation of the System Usability Scale (SUS)

For almost 20 years, practitioners and researchers have been using the System Usability Scale (SUS) as a “quick and dirty” method of evaluating the usability of different websites, software, and other human-machine systems. The characteristics of the SUS (e.g., reliability, number of scales, etc.) have been widely discussed in the literature but there have been little written about how the results of the SUS relate to traditional usability results (likely due primarily to these results being proprietary). In this study, eight different usability studies were used to make a direct comparison between the SUS and usability results. A significant but small relation was found between these two scores suggesting that the SUS may be a valid measure to ordinally compare two or more systems.