I spent some time today working on the UX Walkthrough pages in the Design
Handbook. I was just about to report on what I've done when Allison's
message came through, so I'll do this as a reply.
I revised the User Experience Walkthroughs page to emphasize the Fluid way
of doing things. I put the "Fluid Approach" text into a prominent box in the
upper right of the page so that people will see it when they land on the
page. This could use a bit of polishing, but I think it has the right
effect.
I Renamed the "UX Walkthrough Protocols and Checklists" to "Inspection
Methods and Techniques" so that I could re-use the name for the page
Jonathan created as suggested by Allison. The Methods and Techniques page
has a ton of incoming links that need to be tweaked, but we can defer that
until we decide what to do with it ultimately.
I linked to the new UX Walkthrough Protocols and Checklists page from the
User Experience Walkthroughs page in the section on how to do a
walkthrough. It now emphasizes doing a Fluid-type walkthrough rather than
just selecting from the other inspection methods.
We now have to decide what to do with the "Inspection Methods and
Techniques" page. As I mentioned, it has a lot of incoming links, and it is
really just a sort of omnibus collection of all the different methods, which
someone might like to read from top to bottom. It occurs to me that we
could keep this page and just use anchored links to refer to the sections on
Cognitive Walkthrough, Heuristic Evaluation, etc. Jonathan has created
separate pages for all these, but their content is identical to the section
of the Inspection Methods and Techniques page. We could have the same
logical structure as Allison suggests below, but fewer pages over all.
What do you all think of the idea of keeping all the stuff in one page? My
next step was going to be to link all the stuff together according to
Allison's structure, but I have to decide whether it's one page or many.
Comments?
Paul
Allison Bloodworth wrote:
Hi all,
When we talked about the UX Walkthrough pages today in the design meeting, I
realized the way I'd suggested structuring the pages below was a little off,
so I corrected it here. We'd also talked about bringing the UX Accessibility
Walkthroughs to the top level, so I've added them.
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
'Cognitive Walk valuation' pages
- UX Walkthrough Preparation and Execution (suggest removing section
called "The Fluid Approach" and putting any helpful part of it on the front
page of the "User Experience Walkthroughs" page, as we've established 'UX
Walkthrough' is a Fluid-coined term)
- UX Walkthrough Protocols and Checklists
- 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)
- UX Accessibility Walkthroughs (placed in the "Evaluation and Assessment"
section; suggest renaming it from the current "UX Accessibility Walkthrough
Protocols" and make the page content more descriptive of the protocols
underneath it).
I'm also pasting in a tree view of t here for comparison's sake. It looks
like there is a whole "UX Inspection Methods and Techniques" section that
needs to be dealt with. A couple of those pages (for Cognitive Walkthrough
and Heuristic Evaluation) will probably come to the top level (with User
Experience Walkthrough), but we'll have to find good places for the others.
I will say there appears to be quite a bit of duplicate content out there,
so whatever we can do to delete pages that are just re-stating the same
information I think would be very helpful.
User Experience Walkthroughs
Tips to help evaluate usability
UX Accessibility Walkthrough Protocols
Comprehensive Accessi l for Macintosh
Comprehensive Accessibility Review Protocol for PC
Simple Accessibility Walkthrough Protocol UX Inspection Methods and
Techniques
Additional Questions for All Reviews
UX Walkthrough - Accessibility in Cognitive Walkthrough
dproject.org/display/fluid/UX+Walkthrough+-+Code+Review%2C+a+look+under+the+covers"
style="color: rgb(85, 107, 47); ">UX Walkthrough - Code Review, a look under
the covers
UX Walkthrough - Cognitive Walkthrough
UX Walkthrough FAQ
UX Walkthrough - Heuristic Evaluation
UX Walkthrough Preparation and Execution
UX Walkthrough Protocols and Checklists
UX Walkthrough Report Template
Sakai User Experience Walkthrough Report
uPortal User Experience Walkthrough Report
I think Paul is now going to run with editing and reorganizing this section,
so just let us know Paul if we can be of any more help.
Cheers,
On Feb 27, 2009, at 1:54 PM, Allison Bloodworth wrote:
Thanks Paul for catching that -- I'd added to the list of pages after I
wrote that, and didn't realize the '2 pages' reference no longer made sense.
I've corrected it below. And thanks for all your work on these pages--have
fun at the JASIG conference!
Allison
On Feb 27, 2009, at 1:07 PM, Paul Zablosky wrote:
Hello Allison,
I like your ideas about how to structure the information, and your point
about the coinage of "UX Walkthrough" is something I wasn't aware of, but
it's something important to keep in mind as we frame this stuff. I thought
I understood the details of your proposed structure when I first read your
message, but on a re-reading I'm not quite sure what "references the 2 pages
below means".
You' n of content -- I did some merging and purging on my first pass through
this stuff, but there's more to do yet.
Paul
Allison Bloodworth wrote:
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 t
href="http://wiki.fluidproject.org/display/fluid/User+Experience+Walkthroughs)">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 rea id 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
- 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 n 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 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 i ail 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 relat s," 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 <[email protected]> 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
c 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
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
< lockquote type="cite">Checklist.
Old version: http://wiki.fluidproject.org/x/VAEa
New version: http://wiki.fluidproject.org/x/8QZa
The new ve 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 v 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 / [email protected]
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
[email protected]
Allison Bloodworth
Senior User Interaction Designer
Educational Technology Services
University of California, Berkeley
(415) 377-8243
[email protected]
Allison Bloodworth
Senior User Interaction Designer
Educational Technology Services
University of California, Berkeley
(415) 377-8243
[email protected]
