The Impact of Personality on the Subjective Assessment of Usability

The system usability scale (SUS) has been widely employed in both the field and the laboratory as a valid and reliable measure of system usability. Although its psychometric properties are relatively well understood, the impact that differences in users’ personality traits have on their perceived usability of products, services, and systems has not been deeply explored—even though people’s scores on personality traits have been shown to be reliable and predict a staggering array of societally important outcomes in work, school, and life domains. In this study, 268 users assessed the usability of 20 different products retrospectively with the SUS. Five broad personality traits were then measured using the Mini-IPIP scale. Results indicated that measured personality traits do correlate with the rated usability of products, where measures of Openness to Experience and Agreeableness have the strongest positive correlations with subjective usability assessment. Implications for practitioners, designers, and researchers are discussed.