MUMMS Brief Information

Measuring the Usability of Multi-Media Systems

A user questionnaire is a standard way of getting end user reactions to a piece of software: such questionnaires are used quite widely in consumer research. In the field of computing there have been a number of notable end-user questionnaires going back to the 1980s. One such is the SUMI questionnaire which was developed by the Human Factors Research Group at University College, Cork. In the early 1990s, SUMI swept the board, so that by now every major multi-national IT company uses SUMI in some part of its enterprise, and many consultancies and SMEs in Europe and the United States also use it.

The MUMMS questionnaire was developed in response to the rapidly changing patterns and technology of computing. Multi-media computer products are an established market, and it is necessary to develop ways in which these products can be assessed for quality of use by the end users themselves.

MUMMS reached development as version 4.0. Version 1 was widely used both in Ireland and in a number of research projects in Europe and the USA. As a result of version 1, a number of subscales of end user perceived quality were confirmed. These are:

Affect how much the product captures the user's emotional responses;
Control degree to which the user feels they, and not the product, are setting the pace;
Efficiency degree to which the user can achieve the goals of their interaction with the product;
Helpfulness extent to which the product seems to assist the user;
Learnability ease with which a user can get started and learn new features of the product.

Versions 2 to 4 further refined the items and strengthened factor loadings so that Version 4.0 is now the final stable version for which we have accumulated data on a modest number of Multi Media software systems (we have data on approximately 20 systems supplied by a total of approximately 1,000 users.)

Users of the old SUMI questionnaire will find these subscales familiar. We believe that those five subscales capture five essential ingredients of an end users' appreciation of the quality of a computer application; they have been confirmed in study after study and we were not surprised to see the same constructs emerging from the MUMMS data in version 1. However, as a result of Content Analysis of version 1 data, version 2 developed an emergent subscale that we called Excitement. This is the extent to which end users feel that they are 'drawn into' the world of the multi-media application, and it seems to capture some of the fascination which the best multi-media apps exercise over their users.

Cuurently, work on MUMMS has stopped since 2004 and we have concentated on developing the WAMMI questionnaire for evaluating the user experience of web sites. However, MUMMS is still a viable questionnaire and is used by some companies to monitor the quality of user experience of their Multi Media products.

For more information about MUMMS, contact Dr Jurek Kirakowski at the electronic mail address: jzk@ucc.ie

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