Cognitive Walkthrough
You must use the Cognitive Walkthrough methodology to evaluate the mock-up and produce a set of Usability Aspect Reports (UAR) which describe the identified problems. In class we went through the basic form of a Cognitive Walkthrough. In this coursework you will be doing the more formal approach which is very similar, but more detailed and structured.
Persona
You will need to provide the persona you are using for the evaluation. The persona does not need to be complicated, but it must be clearly written and make the user's knowledge level and goals clear to the evaluators.
Usability Aspect Reports
These are structured forms used for reporting usability issues. You should read the documents linked at the bottom of the page for explainations and examples of how to fill one out. Broadly, these are the usability equivelent of a bug report.
Typically you will link a UAR issue to one of the 10 usability heuristics (also known as Nielson's 10) as a way to more formally explain the issue. While it is possible that an error is not found in the heuristics, most errors will be linked to one of the principles.
Edit: I have removed the requirement about needing a certain number of Heuristics represented.
Writeup
Your writeup should address the following points:
- Methods
- Participants / Evaluators - Who did you invite to perform the evaluation and why did you pick these people? Do not include their names.
- Persona - Why this persona?
- Protocol - Clearly describe the script in words. Explain what you asked the evaluators to do and how you presented the problem to them. Explain any decisions you had to make.
- Data - Basic facts about the walkthrough. How long did it take to complete the evaluation on average? How many issues were identified? How many evaluators were involved? Did they complete the evaluation as a group or seperately?
- Analysis - How did you analyze the data?
- Results
- Summarize the outcomes of evaluation. Based on your data what is working well with the design and what is working poorly and why.
- Inter-rater reliability calculation. How often did your evaluators agree with each other? Was there consensus or dissent?
- Recommendations to the designer. For this section, imagine that you are writing a set of recommendations to the app design team based on your evaluation. What would you recommend they change about the mock-up? What did they do very well?
- Appendix
- Persona
- Tasks and screen sequences.
- All the UAR reports. Yes, it will be a huge attachment and the marker will not read them all. But they will be looking through a selection of them.
Resources
The following resources are good places to start looking for guidance on conducting walkthroughs.
