Walkthroughs in Web Usability: Cognitive, Activity, and Heuristic Walkthrough

Abstract

The evaluators of a website have a need for robust and easy-to-use usability inspection methods to help them to systematically identify the possible usability problems of the website being analysed. Three usability inspection methods – heuristic walkthrough (HW), cognitive walkthrough (CW), and activity walkthrough (AW) – are reviewed in this chapter. Reviewing that work, this chapter discusses the relative advantages and weaknesses of all of the techniques, and suggestions for web evaluation are offered, with a short website example. Based on these analyses, we suggest some changes to website evaluation to improve accuracy and reliability of the current walkthrough methods; however, this chapter is not a comparison between the walkthrough techniques in order to determine which technique is best at detecting usability problems of a website.