Problems of human-computer interaction become crucial when
the human in question is a potential purchaser trying to engage with the complexities of an internet shopping site. These days customer interfaces can be evaluated, experts claim,
by way of a cognitive walk-through.
Walk-through first referred to a physical tour of a facility to check its components, then to a hands-on
peer review of a software product. This walk-through, on the other hand, is not even a virtual tour but a set of task-
based criteria against which a site's features are compared.
Its key aspect is that it is applied by just one expert rather than a whole team and doesn't require human subjects. Like the rival technique known, equally forbiddingly, as evaluative heuristics, it uses only
an abstract template, so is criticised
by those who favour empirical user-
studies in which real people do real things and then report on them.
