Repairing usability problems identified by the cognitive walkthrough for the web

ABSTRACT

Methods for identifying usability problems in web page designs should ideally also provide practical methods for repairing the problems found. Blackmon et al. [2] proved the usefulness of the Cognitive Walkthrough for the Web (CWW) for identifying three types of problems that interfere with users' navigation and information search tasks. Extending that work, this paper reports a series of two experiments that develop and prove the effectiveness of both full-scale and quick-fix CWW repair methods. CWW repairs, like CWW problem identification, use Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) 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. In addition to proving the effectiveness of CWW repairs, the experiments reported here replicate CWW predictions that users will face serious difficulties if web developers fail to repair the usability problems that CWW identifies in web page designs [2].

References

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Index Terms

• Applied computing

  • Document management and text processing

    • Document preparation

      • Multi / mixed media creation

• Computing methodologies

  • Artificial intelligence

    • Philosophical/theoretical foundations of artificial intelligence

      • Cognitive science

• Human-centered computing

  • Human computer interaction (HCI)

    • HCI design and evaluation methods

    • HCI theory, concepts and models

    • Interaction paradigms

      • Hypertext / hypermedia

  • Interaction design

    • Interaction design process and methods

      • User centered design

    • Interaction design theory, concepts and paradigms