Cognitive walkthrough

Draft

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Introduction

According to the NASA usability toolkit, retrieved 12:36, 18 March 2011 (CET), A cognitive walkthroug, is a “process of going step by step through a product or system design and getting reactions from key team players and typical users. One or two members of the design team can guide the walk through while one or more users will comment as the walk through proceeds.”

The Fluid project, retrieved 12:36, 18 March 2011 (CET), provides the following definition: “A cognitive walkthrough is a step-by-step exploration of a service to see how well a particular type of user, usually represented by a persona, is able to accomplish a particular objective or set of objectives. The objectives selected for testing are dictated by the persona that is chosen.”

James Hom defines cognitive walthrough as “review technique where expert evaluators construct task scenarios from a specification or early prototype and then role play the part of a user working with that interface--"walking through" the interface. They act as if the interface was actually built and they (in the role of a typical user) was working through the tasks. Each step the user would take is scrutinized: impasses where the interface blocks the "user" from completing the task indicate that the interface is missing something. Convoluted, circuitous paths through function sequences indicate that the interface needs a new function that simplifies the task and collapses the function sequence.”

Methods

The Fluid project roughly suggest the following procedure.

(1) Choose a user from whose perspective the walkthrough will be done. You may choose a persona for that.

(2) Define what the person wants to achieve

(3) Define the steps that this person should do in order to achive her/his goals

(4) Perform the task and take notes about the following kind of issues for each step:

• Will the user know what to do at this step?
• Is complex problem solving needed to figure out what to do?
• Will they know that they did the right thing (if they manage) and are making progress towards their goal?
• Is complex problem solving needed to interpret the feedback?

This project also defines a much more elaborated UX Walkthrough Process. In particular, it suggests to formalize the inspection process along three axis:

1. A protocol that clearly specifies what we are going to do, and what information we are going to capture along the way.
2. A predetermined clearly specified target that we are going to inspect: (product, version, instance, set of chunks) - the thing we're going to do it to.
3. A report template specifying the format, style and content of the report of the information we capture.

(retrieved 12:36, 18 March 2011 (CET))

Look at their Generic UX Walkthrough Report Template if you need an example

Links

Introductions

• Cognitive Walkthrough at Fluid. Added by Jonathan Hung, last edited by Allison Bloodworth on May 26, 2009.

• UX Walkthrough Process at Fluid Added by Colin Clark, last edited by Paul Zablosky on Feb 12, 2009

• Cognitive Walkthrough by James Hom.

Examples

• Fluid project makes available a series of well-documented examples (from real studies). Search for walkthrough in order to retrieve the impressive list of shared documents. Below are just 2 examples plus one of the templates:
  • uPortal Walkthrough - Ed (Student) Persona (Dogle)
  • Sakai - Justin's Walkthrough
  • Generic UX Walkthrough Report Template

Bibliography

Spencer, Rick. (2000). The streamlined cognitive walkthrough method" CHI 2000 Proceedings, 353-359. PDF at ACM, PDF at Fluid

• Wharton, Cathleen, et. al. (1994). "The Cognitive Walkthrough Method: A Practictioner's Guide." in Nielsen, Jakob, and Mack, R. (eds), Usability Inspection Methods, New York: John Wiley, ISBN 0-471-01877-5.