State of the Art on the Cognitive Walkthrough Method, Its Variants and Evolutions

Abstract

This article discusses interactive system evaluation from the perspective of inspection methods, specifically the Cognitive Walkthrough (CW) method. The basic principles of CW are reviewed as proposed in the original version and the first two revisions. Then 11 significant extensions of CW are examined: Heuristic Walkthrough, The Norman Cognitive Walkthrough Method, Streamlined Cognitive Walkthrough, Cognitive Walkthrough for the Web, Groupware Walkthrough, Activity Walkthrough, Interaction Walkthrough, Cognitive Walkthrough with Users, Extended Cognitive Walkthrough, Distributed Cognitive Walkthrough, and Enhanced Cognitive Walkthrough. Four summaries are proposed: The first one concerns the conceptual, methododological, and technological aspects; the next two summaries deal with existing studies, first comparative and then noncomparative; and the last summary provides help for choosing a version or variant.

We thank the Nord-Pas de Calais region, the state, CISIT, and FEDER, which contributed to support this research. This research has been carried out under auspices of GDRE's ”HumAn-MAchine SYstems in Transportation – HAMASYT.” We thank the authors who sent us some of their articles in order to help us with our research, and the anonymous reviewers for their numerous constructive remarks.

Notes

¹Insofar as several of these studies are rich in results and analyses, it was necessary to summarize them. The three authors provide the summaries and conclusions in this article for the convenience of the readers. For more details, it is necessary to refer to the original articles (see References section).

²According to Cassell, Sullivan, Prevost, and Churchill (2000; as cited in Ruttlay & Akker, 2008), “Virtual humans (VHs) are synthetic characters produced by computational means, which are intended to look like and communicate as real people do” (p. 90).