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Is anyone aware of a generic set of questions, which are suitable for establishing a baseline level of a users experience with a given product / system etc. to conduct a remote survey?

Totally appreciate that ideally you'd want to target this kind of thing to the use case, system etc, but is there any resource which provides a sensible list which people could choose from to help quickly establish the overall opinion of users within a system?

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This sound like the perfect opportunity for System Usability Scoring (also known as SUS). It allows you to ask your users a set of 10 questions about the usability of your application. The responses use Likert scale which you use to score your application. The scoring output is a grade like C+ or B- . This is great to see how your application has improved over time.

You can find the questions here:

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  • SUS is what I was thinking at first, I had almost written the same reply. But when rereading I saw the question was for a generic set of questions to establish baseline system familiarity.
    – It's Dylan
    May 21, 2020 at 16:14
  • I think SUS is the type of thing I was after, thanks :) May 30, 2020 at 8:43
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Ask how long they have been using the product and how often they use it.

Asking users to estimate their experience level is likely to produce inflated values as everyone likes being seen as an expert and few will voluntarily rate themselves as novice.

Frequency of use should correlate well to experience level if it's a product that is used regularly. These questions also serve as good softball openers to warm up your participants before doing additional research.

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As far as I know you won't find a generic set of questions that work for you here. At least I don't know of anything that exists. For the large User Events I facilitate the day usually goes like this.

  • Welcome/hand out surveys while people arrive
  • Introduction
  • Focus Group Questions
  • Exercises/Testing

The surveys have questions about experience with the tools/systems but they are very specific to my program and industry. Those questions are definitely factored in during analysis though. I don't think it's always the case but my work is niche enough that some users really aren't qualified to speak to some sets of functionality or tools.

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