Task Order Effects on the System Usability Scale

The goal of this research is to explore the SUS’ validity when used for both easy and hard tasks on the same product, in order to discover how users justify their behavior and their perceived success on tasks, as reflected by their SUS ratings.

This research will help inform industry practitioners and researchers of the best practices while using the SUS when they have multiple tasks for the same product.

This study is being conducted under supervision of Dr. Phil Kortum alongside Rachel Rice, a fellow graduate student at Rice.

We decided that the best way to perform this study would be to use websites; specifically, hard to use college websites. Participants will be asked to complete two tasks, one easy & one hard, in a randomized order, and rate each task on the SUS. The resulting inflation or deflation of the SUS scores will help us determine the best practice when ordering tasks in a usability study.

This study was built in Qualtrics in order to distribute it to students easily, and to be able to conduct it remotely given the COVID-19 restrictions.

Our target population for this study is undergraduate students at Rice University.