Inuit: The Interface Usability Instrument

Explicit user testing tends to be costly and time-consuming from a company’s point of view. Therefore, it would be desirable to infer a quantitative usability score directly from implicit feedback, i.e., the interactions of users with a web interface. As a basis for this, we require an adequate usability instrument whose items form a usability score and can be meaningfully correlated with such interactions. Thus, we present Inuit, the first instrument consisting of only seven items that have the right level of abstraction to directly reflect user behavior on the client. It has been designed in a two-step process involving usability guideline reviews and expert interviews. A confirmatory factor analysis shows that our model reasonably well reflects real-world perceptions of usability.