Experimenting on the cognitive walkthrough with users

This paper presents a case study aiming to investigate which variant of the Think-Aloud Protocol (i.e., the Concurrent Think-Aloud and the Retrospective Think-Aloud) better integrates with the Cognitive Walkthrough with Users. To this end we performed a case study that involved twelve users and one usability evaluator. Usability problems uncovered by each method were evaluated to help us understand the strengths and weaknesses of the studied usability testing methods. The results suggest that 1) the Cognitive Walkthrough with Users integrates equally well with both the Think-Aloud Protocol variants; 2) the Retrospective Think-Aloud find more usability problems and 3) the Concurrent Think-Aloud is slightly faster to perform and was more cost effective. However, this is only one case study, and further research is needed to verify if the results are actually statistically significant.