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Benefits of cognitive walkthrough
- Low cost
- Quick results
- Easy to prepare and perform
- Intuitive findings easily understood
The effectiveness of cognitive walkthroughs is hard to measure in applied settings, as there is very limited opportunity for controlled experiments while developing applications. Typically measurements involve comparing the number of usability problems found by applying different methods. However, the consensus in the usability community is that the cognitive walkthrough method works well in a variety of settings and applications.
Above all, the cognitive walkthrough method is prized for its ability to generate results quickly with low cost - especially when compared to usability testing - as well as the ability to apply the method early in the design phases, before coding has even begun.
Look out for...
Cognitive walkthroughs are a popular and effective technique. But they are of necessity performed by experts - not users - and a common criticism is that the greater knowledge and familiarity of experts and a perhaps unconscious "that's just obvious" belief about certain tasks or sequences could lead to distortion of the results.
Some usability practitioners (e.g. Blackmon et al, 2002) have suggested - particularly for websites - the use of advanced latent semantic analysis to estimate how closely a user's stated goals match with the labels, instructions, content and "wayfinding" cues of a site. |
Resources |
Wharton, Cathleen, et al (1994) The Cognitive Walkthrough Method: A Practitioner's Guide. In Nielsen, J. and Mack, R. (eds) Usability Inspection Methods. Chichester: John Wiley and Sons. ISBN 0-471-01877-5
Blackmon, M. H. Polson, P.G. Muneo, K & Lewis, C. (2002) Cognitive Walkthrough for the Web. CHI 2002 vol.4 No.1 pp 463-470 |
Alternative methods
Obviously, simply "bearing in mind" the tasks that a user must perform to achieve a given goal is a useful stance to adopt for any kind of interface design project.
More streamlined version of the cognitive walkthrough do exist, where for example the number of questions asked at each task point is reduced from four to two, and where less documentation is produced. This kind of more agile approach is often called a "cognitive Jogthrough".
Reducing the questions still further to just one and dispensing with documentation altogether might constitute a "cognitive sprint". An interesting modern technique is to have stakeholders "role-play" a persona whilst stepping through a cognitive walkthrough.
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