Cognitive walkthrough for the web

  • Authors:
  • Marilyn Hughes Blackmon;Peter G. Polson;Muneo Kitajima;Clayton Lewis

  • Affiliations:
  • University of Colorado at Boulder, Boulder, CO;University of Colorado at Boulder, Boulder, CO;National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), Ibaraki, Japan;University of Colorado at Boulder, Boulder, CO

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
  • Year:
  • 2002

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Abstract

This paper proposes a transformation of the Cognitive Walkthrough (CW), a theory-based usability inspection method that has proven useful in designing applications that support use by exploration. The new Cognitive Walkthrough for the Web (CWW) is superior for evaluating how well websites support users' navigation and information search tasks. The CWW uses Latent Semantic Analysis to objectively estimate the degree of semantic similarity (information scent) between representative user goal statements (100-200 words) and heading/link texts on each web page. Using an actual website, the paper shows how the CWW identifies three types of problems in web page designs. Three experiments test CWW predictions of users' success rates in accomplishing goals, verifying the value of CWW for identifying these usability problems