A cognitive walkthrough is a structured approach to evaluating the usability of a product or service. It involves the tester, who is not a user.
What we did
As a team we did a cognitive walkthrough to investigate how we can make the design more accessible for users, which we will explore further in beta. In our cognitive walkthrough, we all played the role of a school leader, each with an accessibility need and tested the prototype against this need.
The persona's we tested the prototype against were:
partially sighted screenreader user
rheumatoid arthritis user
dyslexic user
profoundly deaf user
partially sighted screen magnifier user
What we found
The walkthrough identified areas we can address to improve accessibility of the service, these include:
Clearer headers - Make certain headings more descriptive so users can more clearly know what content is underneath
Easier way of exploring resources - Adding in an option to ‘explore’ the workload reduction resources rather than having to search for specific resources by name or keyword
Use of colours - Consider the use of colours and what colours would pass a contrast test for users with visual impairments
Positioning of tags and ‘find out more’ – Check the positioning of these features to allow users to better distinguish between these
What we want to investigate
We identified that in beta we need to:
address/explore the recommendations from this cognitive walkthrough in the prototype
test our coded service before release to make sure it meets accessibility standards and guidelines
test the accessibility of the individual resources more