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The System Usability Scale (SUS) in systems engineering
Systems engineering

Systems engineering is an interdisciplinary field of engineering that focuses on how complex engineering projects should be designed and managed....
 is a simple, ten-item attitude Likert scale
Likert scale

A Likert scale is a psychometrics scale commonly used in questionnaires, and is the most widely used scale in survey research. When responding to a Likert questionnaire item, respondents specify their level of agreement to a statement....
 giving a global view of subjective assessments of usability
Usability

Usability is a term used to denote the ease with which people can employ a particular tool or other human-made object in order to achieve a particular goal....
. It was developed by John Brooke at Digital Equipment Corporation
Digital Equipment Corporation

Digital Equipment Corporation was a pioneering United States company in the computer industry. It is often referred to within the computing industry as DEC ....
 in the UK
United Kingdom

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom , the UK or Britain,is a sovereign state located off the northwestern coast of continental Europe....
 in 1986 as a tool to be used in usability engineering
Usability engineering

Usability engineering is a field that is concerned generally with human-computer interaction and specifically with making human-computer interfaces that have high Usability or user friendliness....
 of electronic office
Electronic office

The electronic office, or e-office, was a term coined to cover the increasing use of computer-based information technology for office work, especially in the 1980s....
 systems.

The usability of a system, as defined by the ISO standard ISO 9241
ISO 9241

ISO 9241 is a multi-part standardization covering a number of aspects for people working with computers. Although originally titled Ergonomic requirements for office work with visual display terminals it is being retitled to the more generic Ergonomics of Human System Interaction by International Organization for Standardization ....
 Part 11, can be measured only by taking into account the context of use of the system — i.e., who is using the system, what they are using it for, and the environment in which they are using it.






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The System Usability Scale (SUS) in systems engineering
Systems engineering

Systems engineering is an interdisciplinary field of engineering that focuses on how complex engineering projects should be designed and managed....
 is a simple, ten-item attitude Likert scale
Likert scale

A Likert scale is a psychometrics scale commonly used in questionnaires, and is the most widely used scale in survey research. When responding to a Likert questionnaire item, respondents specify their level of agreement to a statement....
 giving a global view of subjective assessments of usability
Usability

Usability is a term used to denote the ease with which people can employ a particular tool or other human-made object in order to achieve a particular goal....
. It was developed by John Brooke at Digital Equipment Corporation
Digital Equipment Corporation

Digital Equipment Corporation was a pioneering United States company in the computer industry. It is often referred to within the computing industry as DEC ....
 in the UK
United Kingdom

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom , the UK or Britain,is a sovereign state located off the northwestern coast of continental Europe....
 in 1986 as a tool to be used in usability engineering
Usability engineering

Usability engineering is a field that is concerned generally with human-computer interaction and specifically with making human-computer interfaces that have high Usability or user friendliness....
 of electronic office
Electronic office

The electronic office, or e-office, was a term coined to cover the increasing use of computer-based information technology for office work, especially in the 1980s....
 systems.

The usability of a system, as defined by the ISO standard ISO 9241
ISO 9241

ISO 9241 is a multi-part standardization covering a number of aspects for people working with computers. Although originally titled Ergonomic requirements for office work with visual display terminals it is being retitled to the more generic Ergonomics of Human System Interaction by International Organization for Standardization ....
 Part 11, can be measured only by taking into account the context of use of the system — i.e., who is using the system, what they are using it for, and the environment in which they are using it. Furthermore, measurements of usability have several different aspects:

  • effectiveness (can users successfully achieve their objectives)
  • efficiency (how much effort and resource is expended in achieving those objectives)
  • satisfaction (was the experience satisfactory)


Measures of effectiveness and efficiency are also context specific. Effectiveness in using a system for controlling a continuous industrial process would generally be measured in very different terms to, say, effectiveness in using a word processor. Thus, it can be difficult, if not impossible, to answer the question “is system A more usable than system B”, because the measures of effectiveness and efficiency may be very different. However, it can be argued that given a sufficiently high-level definition of subjective assessments of usability, comparisons can be made between systems.

SUS has generally been seen as providing this type of high-level subjective view of usability and is thus often used in carrying out comparisons of usability between systems. Because it yields a single score on a scale of 0-100, it can be used to compare even systems that are outwardly dissimilar. This one-dimensional aspect of the SUS is both a benefit and a drawback, because the questionnaire is necessarily quite general.

It has been widely used in the evaluation of a range of systems.

Further reading

  • Tullis, T.S., and Stetson, J.N. A Comparison of Questionnaires for Assessing Website Usability, Usability Professional Association Conference, 2004.


  • Bangor, A., Kortum, P.T. and Miller, J.A. (2008) An empirical evaluation of the System Usability Scale (SUS). International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction 24(6). 574-594