Enhanced Cognitive Walkthrough: Development of the Cognitive Walkthrough Method to Better Predict, Identify, and Present Usability Problems

To avoid use errors when handling medical equipment, it is important to develop products with a high degree of usability. This can be achieved by performing usability evaluations in the product development process to detect and mitigate potential usability problems. A commonly used method is cogniti...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Lars-Ola Bligård, Anna-Lisa Osvalder
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Hindawi Limited 2013-01-01
Series:Advances in Human-Computer Interaction
Online Access:http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2013/931698
Description
Summary:To avoid use errors when handling medical equipment, it is important to develop products with a high degree of usability. This can be achieved by performing usability evaluations in the product development process to detect and mitigate potential usability problems. A commonly used method is cognitive walkthrough (CW), but this method shows three weaknesses: poor high-level perspective, insufficient categorisation of detected usability problems, and difficulties in overviewing the analytical results. This paper presents a further development of CW with the aim of overcoming its weaknesses. The new method is called enhanced cognitive walkthrough (ECW). ECW is a proactive analytical method for analysis of potential usability problems. The ECW method has been employed to evaluate user interface designs of medical equipment such as home-care ventilators, infusion pumps, dialysis machines, and insulin pumps. The method has proved capable of identifying several potential use problems in designs.
ISSN:1687-5893
1687-5907