Explorations on Single Usability Metrics

Explore a conference talk from the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems that delves into the challenges and considerations of developing Single Usability Metrics (SUM) for product evaluation. Learn about Microsoft's long-term summative evaluation program, which aimed to generate SUM scores across products over time. Discover the issues encountered during this process, including error rate reliability, difficulties in establishing objective time-on-task targets, and scale anchoring problems. Examine how these challenges impacted the communication of SUM scores and led to the exploration of alternative metrics using simple thresholds developed from anchor text and inter-metric correlations. Gain insights into various aspects of usability measurement, including counting errors, average satisfaction, time on task limitations, and methods for measuring user experience and satisfaction. Conclude with a summary of findings and participate in a Q&A session to further understand the complexities of single usability metrics in computing systems.