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Applying cognitive walkthroughs to more complex user interfaces: experiences, issues, and recommendations

Published: 01 June 1992 Publication History

Abstract

The Cognitive Walkthrough methodology was developed in an effort to bring cognitive theory closer to practice; to enhance the design and evaluation of use interfaces in industrial settings. For the first time, small teams of professional developers have used this method to critique three complex software systems. In this paper we report evidence about how the methodology worked for these evaluations. We focus on five core issues: (1) task selection, coverage, and evaluation, (2) the process of doing a Cognitive Walkthrough, (3) requisite knowlege for the evaluators, (4) group walkthroughs, and (5) the interpretation of results. Our findings show that many variables can affect the success of the technique; we believe that if the Cognitive Walkthrough is ultimately to be successful in industrial settings, the method must be refined and augmented in a variety of ways.

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cover image ACM Conferences
CHI '92: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
June 1992
713 pages
ISBN:0897915135
DOI:10.1145/142750
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 01 June 1992

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Author Tags

  1. Cognitive Walkthrough
  2. group walkthroughs
  3. task-based evaluations
  4. usability inspection method
  5. user interface evaluation

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CHI92: Conference on Human Factors in Computing
May 3 - 7, 1992
California, Monterey, USA

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CHI '92 Paper Acceptance Rate 67 of 216 submissions, 31%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 6,199 of 26,314 submissions, 24%

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