This document has everything you’ll need to run a SUS survey, including 4 form options, a Notion Database for documenting the scores, a scale showing what the scores mean, and an example deck for presenting to stakeholders.
Here’s what Usability.gov has to say:
The System Usability Scale (SUS) provides a “quick and dirty”, reliable tool for measuring usability. It consists of a 10-item questionnaire with five response options for respondents; from Strongly agree to Strongly disagree. Originally created by John Brooke in 1986, it allows you to evaluate a wide variety of products and services, including hardware, software, mobile devices, websites, and applications.
SUS has become an industry standard, with references in over 1300 articles and publications. The noted benefits of using SUS include that it:
<aside> 💡 In my personal experience, when senior stakeholders see the scores from a SUS, they have no trouble understanding or accepting them. This has been incredibly helpful for me when attempting to convince stakeholders using data-based information regarding how objectively good or bad the usability of a particular system is. I’ve found it’s also helpful to establish a baseline or benchmark at the beginning of a redesign which can then be compared to subsequent iterations throughout a project’s design cycle; from testing prototypes, all the way to actual implementation.
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🚧 Fair warnings and limitations of this method
It could be helpful to think of the SUS as a radar system with a really wide range. In a complex system, it can show you some blips that might indicate the presence of usability issues. Once you see these blips, you may still need to go from radar to telescope, to microscope in order to identify the specific usability issues that produced the blips. A key thing to remember is that at times a user could be coming from a completely different area of your application carrying some frustration from a previous frame of reference that could cause them to rate the usability of the current feature poorly. To summarize: The SUS is not a silver bullet. It’s the first step on the way to identifying and correcting usability issues in your system and should not become a reason to neglect other more granular research methods and approaches.
For the cleanest data output a survey can be prompted after a user completes the use of a key feature or critical process within a product, something like this:
Example of a success message prompting a user to rate the usability on a System Usability Scale.