JUS - UXPA International

SUS: A Retrospective

Introduction Rather more than 25 years ago, as part of a usability engineering program, I developed a questionnaire—the System Usability Scale (SUS)—that could be used to take a quick measurement of how people perceived the usability of computer systems on which they were working. This proved to be an extremely simple and reliable tool for use when doing usability evaluations, and I decided, with the blessing of engineering management at Digital Equipment Co. Ltd (DEC; where I developed SUS), that it was probably something that could be used by other organizations (the benefit for us being that if they did use it, we potentially had something we could use to compare their systems against ours). So, in 1986, I made …

Introduction

Journal of Usability Studies, Volume 8, Issue 2, February 2013 We have a special treat in this issue. John Brooke has written an essay about the history and current status of the System Usability Scale (SUS), a usability questionnaire that has become very popular with user experience professionals for the measurement of perceived usability. John relates why he created the scale more than 25 years ago and how he and his colleagues, at what was the Digital Equipment Corporation, developed it and then made it available to the user experience community. It promises to remain an important part of our toolkit for the foreseeable future. Our peer-reviewed article, by Alison Doubleday, makes a clear and compelling case for iterative card …

Special Thanks to Marilyn Tremaine

Journal of Usability Studies, Volume 8, Issue 2, February 2013 Marilyn has decided to step down from being Co-Editor in Chief of JUS so that she can spend more time on other aspects of her long and successful professional career. During her tenure at the journal she has taken the lead in promoting the journal to professionals in user experience and related disciplines. She also has encouraged researchers to investigate user experience issues with relevance to practice. Her valuable counsel will be missed.

Inclusive Design Advisor: Understanding the Design Practice Before Developing Inclusivity Tools

This paper describes an exploratory study investigating ways to accommodate inclusive design techniques and tools within industrial design practices. The approach of our research is that by making only small changes in design features, designers end up with more inclusive products.

This paper outlines a system for arm rehabilitation for children with upper-limb hemiplegia resulting from cerebral palsy. Our research team designed a two-player, interactive (competitive or collaborative) computer play therapy system that provided powered assistance to children while they played specially designed games that promoted arm exercises…

Special Issue of the Journal of Usability Studies: Designing Inclusive Systems

The Cambridge Workshop on Universal Access and Assistive Technology (CWUAAT) is held every other year at a UK Cambridge University college. CWUAAT ’12 was part of this series, started in 2002, that presents research from the international inclusive design community. It is a unique multi-disciplinary workshop, where designers, computer scientists, engineers, architects, human factors specialists, policymakers, and user communities are encouraged to meet and discuss their common interests. This special issue of the Journal of Usability Studies contains a selection of papers that were re-written and expanded from their contributions presented at the 2012 workshop. The workshop theme “Designing Inclusion for real-world applications” refers to the emerging potential and relevance of the latest generations of inclusive design data, tools, techniques, …