By Karandeep Dhillon and Tamanna Haider for Team Fridge
A Cognitive Walkthrough is a step-by-step approach to evaluating the usability of a product. Testers/users have a goal or task and try to accomplish it by interacting with wireframes. Wireframes are “screen blueprints” where all the functionality and pages that are going to be in that product are represented with their own page/slide in the wireframe. Wireframes help with the structure of the product and allow the software engineers to get an idea of everything the product needs to have and be able to do. At each step of the cognitive walkthrough, testers/users answer a series of questions. The questions are generally about if the user knows what to do at this step and does the user know he/she has made progress toward their goal. Cognitive walkthroughs help identify at which steps the testers/users were either lost on what to do or failed at accomplishing their goal. This gives feedback to the usability engineers on what they need to change in the wireframes before giving them to the software engineers.
We also received Informal Feedback when our software engineers demoed the current state of the product to an audience that was primarily other software engineers. This allowed us to showcase the product and receive feedback on what we can change, improve, and add to our product to make it more compelling to our customers so we can have an advantage over our competitors. The audience presented us with new insights and questions regarding our product that we had not thought about before.
Cognitive Walkthrough:
Informal Feedback:
From our methods and findings, we can conclude that our product needs have medium fidelity for our design. Our cognitive walkthrough results indicate that for the most part, our evaluators knew what they were doing and if they were making progress toward their goal. However, some scenarios were more easily accomplished than others. To further elaborate, our evaluators were not sure in certain steps if they were making progress because of the user feedback and assumptions they were making at certain steps. This leads us to notice that we need more wireframes to allow for all the functionality we intend to have with our final product. Along with this, we need to implement user feedback in the areas found in the cognitive walkthrough results. We noticed that our findings recommend making our application seamless and as automated as possible. This would significantly reduce the amount of user effort required to keep track of their food items. We plan to use all of our findings and conclusions to make our prototypes and advance the current state of our project.
For our cognitive walkthrough, our testers/users were given a persona and a scenario by which they conducted the cognitive walkthrough. This has its limitations because each individual would take on the persona and scenario differently with varying results. Another factor is that our analysis is from a small sample set that completed the cognitive walkthrough. To get more accurate results, we would have to observe multiple real users in real-time. Our wireframes were also not interactive so people doing the cognitive walkthrough were a little clueless about the path they were going and if they were making any progress toward their goal. The lack of visual design in wireframes is another caveat that might’ve influenced our results. From our cognitive walkthrough results, we also discovered that our wireframes were not complete and did not represent all the functionality and pages that we intended our product to have. This was a major caveat that influenced our results.