ABSTRACT
The Cognitive Walkthrough for the Web (CWW) is a theory-based usability inspection method for detecting and correcting design errors that interfere with finding information on a website (Blackmon et al. 2002, 2003). CWW, like the original Cognitive Walkthrough (see section on Cognitive Walkthrough Approach), simulates step-by-step user behavior for a given task and assumes that users perform goal-driven exploration. But CWW is specially tailored to simulate users navigating a website and better fits a realistic website design process, considering three features specific to website design. First, CWW uses realistic narrative descriptions of user goals that incorporate rich information about users’ understanding of their tasks and underlying motivation. Second, CWW assumes that generating an action on a webpage (e.g. clicking a link, button, or other widget) is a two-step process. Step one is an attention process that parses a webpage into subregions and attends to the subregion of the page that is semantically most similar to the user goal. Step two is an action selection process that selects and acts on a widget from the attended-to subregion, the widget semantically most similar to the user goal. This two-step CWW web navigation mechanism is derived from a theory of the cognitive processes that control goal driven exploration, CoLiDeS (Kitajima et al. 2000). CoLiDeS, an acronym for Comprehensionbased Linked model of Deliberate Search, extends a series of earlier models of performing by exploration, based on Kintsch’s construction-integration theory of text comprehension and problem solving processes (Kintsch 1998). CoLiDeS is part of a broad consensus among theorists and website usability experts that problem solving processes, guided by users’ goals and information scent, drive users’ information-seeking or search behaviors when exploring a new website or carrying out a novel task on a familiar website (see section on Studies on User Behavior on the Web for models of web navigation). Third, the CWW evaluation process can balance competing constraints by working on web pages in relation to a whole set of representative user goals. The CWW evaluation process can start with only a detailed description of the home
page and a rough outline of its immediate successor pages, and can then be applied repeatedly to incrementally design and evaluate each successor page down through the hierarchy.
