Standardized Usability Questionnaires: Features and Quality Focus

Abstract

For the last few decades more than twenty standardized usability questionnaires for evaluating software systems have been proposed. These instruments have been widely used in the assessment of usability of user interfaces. They have their own characteristics, can be generic or address specific kinds of systems and can be composed of one or several items. Some comparison or comparative studies were also conducted to identify the best one in different situations. All these issues should be considered while choosing a questionnaire. In this paper, we present an extensive review of these questionnaires considering their key features, some classifications and main comparison studies already performed. Moreover, we present the result of a detailed analysis of all items being evaluated in each questionnaire to indicate those that can identify users’ perceptions about specific usability problems. This analysis was performed by confronting each questionnaire item (around 475 items) with usability criteria proposed by quality standards (ISO 9421-11 and ISO/WD 9241-112) and classical quality ergonomic criteria.