How does your product stand up to walk-up-and-use evaluation? Streamlined cognitive walkthrough is a discount usability method that is used to test the learnability of an interface near the beginning of the design prototyping process.

How it works

A product team over the course of a single session is guided through predetermined tasks while referencing an early version of the interface. At each task step, the team determines whether users are given enough information in the interface to progress toward the goal of their task and whether users would be able to tell that they were progressing toward their goal.

Pros:

• Advantages to this method include process transparency and engagement with the cross-functional product team as well as rapid turnaround of results.

Cons:

• This does not return the richness of qualitative insights that would be gotten through testing with actual end users. Issues would have been discovered in Usability Testing with real users might be overlooked.