Accepted for/Published in: JMIR mHealth and uHealth
Date Submitted: Feb 15, 2022
Date Accepted: Jul 25, 2022
System Usability Scale Benchmarking for Digital Health Apps
ABSTRACT
Background:
The System Usability Scale (SUS) is a widely used scale that has been used to quantify the usability of many software and hardware products. However, the SUS scale was not specifically designed to evaluate mobile apps, or indeed Digital Health Apps (DHAs).
Objective:
The objective of this study is to examine whether the widely used SUS distribution for benchmarking (mean of 68 and standard deviation of 12.5) can be used to reliably assess the usability of DHAs.
Methods:
A search of the literature was performed using ACM Digital Library, IEEE Xplore, CORE, PubMed, and Google Scholar databases to identify SUS scores related to the usability of DHAs for meta-analysis. In total, 117 SUS scores for 114 DHAs were identified. R Studio and the R programming language was used to model the DHA SUS distribution, with a one-sample t-test used to compare this distribution with the standard SUS distribution.
Results:
The mean SUS score when all the collected apps were included was 76.64±15.12 (mean ± standard deviation), however this distribution exhibited asymmetrical skewness (-0.52) and was not normally distributed according to Shapiro-Wilk test (P=.002). The mean SUS score for ‘physical activity’ apps was 83.28±12.39 and was driving the skewness. Hence, the mean SUS score for all collected apps, excluding ‘physical activity’ apps, was 68.05 ± 14.05. A one-sample t-test indicated that this health app SUS distribution was not statistically significantly different from the standard SUS distribution (P=.98).
Conclusions:
This study concludes that SUS and the widely accepted benchmark of a mean SUS score of 68±12.5 is suitable for evaluating the usability of DHAs.
Citation
Request queued. Please wait while the file is being generated. It may take some time.
Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.