Fluid UX Walkthrough protocol - reorganized, looking for feedback.

Fri Feb 27 19:53:19 UTC 2009

Hi Jonathan,

Thanks much for your work on this! I would lean toward Paul's
suggestion of giving specific descriptions of all three methods
(probably on their own pages): the cognitive walk-through, the
heuristic evaluation, and the combined method used in the Fluid UX
Walkthroughs.  If we can pull out the content for the cognitive
walkthroughs and heuristic evaluations into their own pages, then we
can also refer to them without putting all that content inline in the
same page (e.g. on http://wiki.fluidproject.org/display/fluid/User+Experience+Walkthroughs)
.  As the Fluid UX Walkthroughs also include an HTML code review (for
accessibility), we could consider making that its own page as well.
There may be versions of these pages as children under: http://wiki.fluidproject.org/display/fluid/UX+Walkthrough+Protocols+and+Checklists
, but I think they would need some updating--it appears they may just
be the parts of the parent page.

One important point: a UX Walkthrough was something we invented for
Fluid--at least I'd never heard that term before and if you google it
all the hits are Fluid Pages. So I think the UX Walkthrough page
really *should* describe Fluid UX Walkthroughs and perhaps their
component parts (e.g. heuristic eval, cognitive walkthrough, code
review). With that in mind, here's the structure for the pages that
I'd recommend:

User Experience
- Fluid User Experience Walkthroughs (How we do and did them in Fluid
- this is a different page from the one Jonathan created called "Fluid
UX Walkthroughs": http://wiki.fluidproject.org/display/fluid/Fluid+User+Experience+Walkthroughs)

Design Handbook
- User Experience Walkthroughs (placed in the "Evaluation and
Assessment" section) - this actually describes the Fluid approach and
references the 2 pages below
   - Fluid UX Walkthroughs (I'd suggest renaming this "UX Walkthrough
Protocols and Checklists")
     - UX Walkthrough Preparation and Execution
     - Tips to help evaluate usability
     - UX Walkthrough Report Template
- Cognitive Walkthough (placed in the "Evaluation and Assessment"
section)
- Heuristic Evaluation (placed in the "Evaluation and Assessment"
section)

Perhaps this was Jonathan's eventual intention, but I don't think the
"Fluid UX Walkthroughs" page (http://wiki.fluidproject.org/display/fluid/Fluid+UX+Walkthrough
) *and* the original UX Walkthrough Protocols and Checklists page (http://wiki.fluidproject.org/display/fluid/UX+Walkthrough+Protocols+and+Checklists
) should both exist--I reviewed the content on both pages to ensure
it's all been captured, and I'd suggest deleting or archiving the
original. Additionally, the name of the final page should probably not
be "Fluid UX Walkthroughs" as that could be confused with the "Fluid
User Experience Walkthroughs" page (which gives info on the
walkthroughs we did in Fluid) in the "User Experience" section. I'd
suggest keeping the name of the combined page "UX Walkthrough
Protocols and Checklists." However, one thing I wasn't able to resolve
was the fact that there are somewhat different instructions on these
pages: Jonathan's new page seems to infer that you must do a heuristic
evaluation, cognitive walkthrough, and assess accessibility, and the
other says, "It is not necessary for you to use all three methods to
contribute to the Fluid UX walkthrough endeavour. Nor must you address
both accessibility and usability." So we'll have to figure out what we
really want to recommend.

I also made some edits to the User Experience Walkthroughs, Fluid UX
Walkthroughs & UX Walkthrough Preparation & Execution pages to clarify
a few things we'd talked about in our emails re: the approach. For
instance, in Jonathan's email below he mentions a heuristic
walkthrough and a cognitive evaluation, and I noticed the term
"cognitive evaluation" used in a couple places on the web pages. To
ensure that people know what we are talking about, I think we want to
consistently use the terms "heuristic evaluation" and "cognitive
walkthrough" so I made that change in any wiki page where I saw an
alternative term used. I also tried to specify "UX walkthrough" when
we are talking about the "Fluid UX Walkthrough" instead of just
"walkthrough" so it's not confused with a "cognitive walkthrough."

Another change I made involved making sure it was clear that personas
weren't *required* to do a cognitive walkthrough and describing a bit
about what to do if you didn't have them. Finally, there were
references to usability relating to the heuristics and accessibility
relating to "cognitive concerns," but I don't think that's quite right
as the cognitive walkthrough is a usability inspection method which
can also be used to assess accessibility so I changed that a bit.

I've also noticed quite a bit of repeated content among these pages,
so I think it would be great if someone with fresh eyes could a
holistic look at all of them and an effort remove duplicated content.
For instance, there is overlap between "UX Walkthrough Preparation &
Execution" and "UX Walkthrough Protocols & Checklists"/"Fluid UX
Walkthroughs" (/'d because they are essentially the same page).

Cheers,
Allison

On Feb 20, 2009, at 7:58 AM, Jonathan Hung wrote:

> I wonder if it will be confusing if we provide those individual
> checklists in addition to our Fluid UX walkthrough? Perhaps we can
> make those individual checklists as PDF attachments. We would then
> communicate in the Fluid UX Walkthrough that they can optionally
> perform the evaluations separately and link to the individual PDF
> files.
>
> I added the procedure for selecting a Persona to the Preparation and
> Execution page. I think that page will be very helpful when combined
> with the Fluid UX Walkthrough document.
>
> Does anyone else have an opinion as to how we should present the Fluid
> UX Walkthough, Heuristic Walkthrough, and the Cognitive Evaluation?
>
> - Jonathan.
>
> On Wed, Feb 18, 2009 at 7:41 PM, Paul Zablosky
> <Paul.Zablosky at ubc.ca> wrote:
>> Hi Jonathan,
>>    Your "Fluid UX Walkthrough" page looks good.  I agree that
>> there's a lot
>> of material, and it's a bit dense, but the idea was to capture the
>> Fluid
>> approach all in one page, and I think you have done it.   The
>> question
>> remains: are we going to provide pages on the individual techniques
>> as well
>> as the bundled description?
>>
>> With our current page hierarchy, which looks something like this:
>>
>> User Experience Walkthroughs
>>
>> Fluid UX Walkthrough
>> UX Walkthrough Preparation and Execution
>> UX Walkthrough Protocols and Checklists
>>
>> Additional Questions for all reviewers
>> UX Walkthrough - Heuristic Evaluation
>> UX Walkthrough - Cognitive Walkthrough
>> ... other current children
>>
>> we could enhance the top level page to give the user a choice --
>> they can
>> either follow the Fluid way (with your new page), or they can just
>> select
>> one or more of the techniques.  I'm not committed to one way or the
>> other --
>> I'd like to hear what others think about this.
>>
>> Paul
>>
>> Jonathan Hung wrote:
>>
>> Hi all,
>>
>> As part of the effort to reorganize the UX Walkthrough protocol, I
>> have made a draft revision of the UX Walkthrough Protocol and
>> Checklist.
>>
>> Old version: http://wiki.fluidproject.org/x/VAEa
>> New version: http://wiki.fluidproject.org/x/8QZa
>>
>> The new version attempts to deliver the following:
>> 1. Convey the parallel nature of the Heuristic and Cognitive
>> evaluations.
>> 2. Incorporate accessibility heuristic and cognitive evaluations.
>> 3. Lay out the walkthrough in a more check-list manner.
>>
>> All the content from the old version is present in the new version,
>> but with some modifications where necessary.
>>
>> My concern is that the new document is a bit dense, but I hope that,
>> in context of being a checklist / reference for executing a UX
>> evaluation, the content density would be okay.
>>
>> Do you think the new version of the walkthrough is more beneficial to
>> a would-be implementer compared to the old version? Are there areas
>> for improvement? Any concerns?
>>
>> - Jonathan.
>>
>> ---
>> Jonathan Hung / jhung.utoronto at gmail.com
>> Fluid Project - ATRC at University of Toronto
>> Tel: (416) 946-3002
>>
>>

Allison Bloodworth
Senior User Interaction Designer
Educational Technology Services
University of California, Berkeley
(415) 377-8243
abloodworth at berkeley.edu

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