Understanding Different Types of 100-Point Scales

You’re 25% complete. Still a ways to go.

You got a score of 90 out of 100 on a math test. Not bad.

You got 1475 on the SAT—the 95th percentile. Awesome!

Only 40% of users completed the task. Not great.

The average score on a seven-point scale was 5.2. Hmm. Is that good?

One of the more challenging parts about using metrics is making them meaningful. This is especially the case for scores unfamiliar to your stakeholders.

When presented with new metrics, common questions are:

• Is higher better?
• What’s the highest possible score? The lowest?
• What’s good, bad, or average?
• Can you have negative scores?

Absolute percentages are used commonly across many domains in business and science. They have a familiarity and intuitiveness because seeing a percentage provides answers to many of the above questions. Higher is better; the lowest score is 0% and the highest is 100%; you can’t have negative scores.

But many useful metrics don’t lend themselves well to percentages. For example, rating scales are one the most popular (and effective) ways to gauge someone’s sentiment about an interface or experience.

Multipoint scales, though, are rarely presented as 0 to 100-point scales (which we refer to as 100-point scales for the rest of this article), with most standardized UX questionnaires having five or seven points. For example, the SEQ? has one seven-point scale, the SUS uses ten five-point scales, and the SUPR-Q? uses seven five-point scales plus one eleven-point likelihood-to-recommend scale. To make raw rating scale scores more interpretable, they can be transformed into 100-point scales or compared to a reference database to get percentile scores.

Absolute percentages, percentiles, and linear transformations all convert raw data to scores that range from 0 to 100. Sounds good, but while they have the same scale range, their interpretations are slightly different, which can lead to confusion. Here are the differences between absolute percentages, percentiles, and rating scale transformations to 100-point scales.

Read the full article on MeasuringU's Blog

Summary

Below is a table comparing the different scales discussed in this article. All have their role in UX measurement, but all are interpreted a bit differently, so be sure you know if any score you’re trying to interpret is an absolute percentage, a percentile, or a rating scale score transformed to a 100-point scale.

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