The Relationship Between User Mouse-based Performance And Subjective Usability Assessments

Objective metrics, such as effectiveness and efficiency, are often considered to be the best website usability measurements. User performance metrics that can be collected remotely, such as mouse clicks and the distance the mouse has traveled show particular promise. However, no studies have demonstrated a direct relationship between subjective usability measures and these two objective user performance metrics. In this paper, thirty participants completed five different tasks of varying difficulty on a commercial website. Mouse clicks, the distance the mouse moved, success rates, and System Usability Scale (SUS) scores were collected for each task. Results showed that participants made fewer mouse clicks on tasks at which they were successful than on tasks they failed. Participants moved the mouse over twice as far on failed tasks as compared to successful tasks. The correlations between SUS scores and the two mouse-based measurements were remarkably strong.