Cognitive Walkthrough
Cognitive Walkthrough is an inspection method for evaluating interface designs by simulating and analyzing how users will learn to use a system through exploration and trial. Developed by Clayton Lewis, Peter Polson, Cathleen Wharton, and John Rieman in 1990, this method is grounded in cognitive psychology and focuses specifically on learnability—whether first-time or occasional users can discover how to perform tasks without formal training. Evaluators role-play user actions, answer a set of critical questions about feedback and discovery at each step, and document usability problems.
Source record
Citations copied verbatim from the method’s source record. No claim-level verification is inferred from them.
- Lewis, C., Polson, P. G., Wharton, C., & Rieman, J. (1990). Testing a walkthrough methodology for specifying and evaluating user interface designs. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 387–392). · URL
- Wharton, C., Rieman, J., Lewis, C., & Polson, P. (1994). The cognitive walkthrough method: A practitioner's guide. In J. Nielsen & R. L. Mack (Eds.), Usability Inspection Methods (pp. 105–140). John Wiley & Sons. · ISBN 0-471-01877-5
Curated claims
Claims persisted in the evidence ledger, each with its own assessment.
This view does not invent a claim assessment when the ledger has none.
Related methods
Generated from the method graph and shown as machine-suggested relations — no evidence claim is inferred.