A cognitive walkthrough is one effective method for user experience professionals to evaluate a design. This inspection method allows a single designer or researcher to make suggestions on how to improve an interface without contacting primary users. The focus of a cognitive walkthrough is on an interface’s learnability for novice users. The cognitive walkthrough may not be the most popular method for evaluating designs, but it’s an important process to understand and add to your UX tool belt.
The first thing to do with a cognitive walkthrough is to identify the primary task you’d like to evaluate. Next, parse all the necessary actions that must take place in order for the task to be considered complete. Once a task is divided into its individual steps, each step or action sequence is analyzed according to the following four questions:
- Will the user try to achieve the right effect?
- Will the user notice that the correct action is available?
- Will the user associate the correct action with the effect they are trying to achieve?
- If the correct action is performed, will the user see that the progress is being made toward the solution of their task?
Once each of these questions is asked for each step in a task, you will be able to isolate which portions of a task…
