To evaluate our application, expert evaluation in the form of cognitive walkthrough has been performed. Expert evaluation has been a very valuable method in our design, especially thanks to early identification and correction of issues. We chose to use cognitive walkthrough because it is particularly useful for evaluating the usability of interactive systems, like our application, and identifying potential barriers to task completion.
Cognitive walkthrough was chosen over heuristic analysis. Heuristic analysis evaluates the system based on a set of general usability principles. On the other hand, cognitive walkthrough attempts to simulate the thought process of a new user, providing much more valuable insights to our design process.
Expert evaluation was applied to the medium fidelity prototype in Appendix X. The evaluation were conducted with experts reflecting the personas described in Appendix X. In other words, expert evaluation was conducted with 3 different experts:
The anticipated experts are presumed to have no prior knowledge of our system or comparable applications. They are using an application of this nature for the first time.
The Cognitive walkthrough is divided in two distinct phases: the preparatory phase and the execution phase.
Initially, we undertake the preparatory phase, during which we establish the goals and identify the users. The chosen task scenarios represent most of the use cases, and as a result they cover most of the potential usability and affordance issues.
These scenarios are mostly related to each other in that they can be executed in a sequence, but they can also be done independently:
The initial state of the app is the “Sign up” page for the first goal (Create an account), and the “Home screen” for the other goals.
The action sequences for the goals are as follows: