Fluid User Experience Walkthroughs

What are Fluid UX Walkthroughs?

Fluid UX Walkthroughs are a combination of usability and accessibility reviews of Fluid partner applications, with the goal of identifying user "pain points," and then proposing and prioritizing user interface improvements to address them. Read more about UX Walkthroughs

Evaluations are conducted as:

• heuristic evaluations - comparing the user interface against an accepted set of "rules" or heuristics.
• cognitive walkthroughs - determining how easy it is for a user to use the application.
• Code convention compliance reviews - evaluating compliance to a set of best practices for achieving accessibility and usability.

How are Fluid UX Walkthroughs Performed?

Fluid UX Walkthroughs are performed by reviewers with diverse areas of expertise residing at a number of different institutions. To ensure consistency of approach and results the following material has been created to guide their efforts.

• UX Walkthrough Preparation and Execution: This is a general description of the Fluid approach to walkthroughs with guidelines for conducting a walkthrough.
• UX Walkthrough Protocols and Checklists: These are the protocols (detailed steps and instructions) and checklists (criteria and points for examination) recommended to Fluid reviewers, as well as links to background and reference material.
• UX Walkthrough Report Template: This is a set of standard templates for recording raw inspection results under common headings.
• Accessibility Review Protocols: Simple steps you can use to assess the accessibility of your website or web application.

The protocols and guidelines will continue to be refined as we learn from doing the hybrid inspections/evaluations.

Fluid Project Walkthroughs and Working Groups

Within the Fluid Project, walkthroughs have been performed by walkthrough working groups. Most of the groups have had representatives from two or more institutions, with each group focused on a specific product.
Products examined so far include uPortal, Sakai, and Moodle.

Results from Previous Walkthroughs

UX Walkthrough Results:

You can find links to the results of all UX Walkthroughs on this page. This includes the Pre-Summit and Post-Summit walkthrough results.

UX Walkthrough Project Plan

User Experience Walkthroughs are used in the Fluid project to evaluate and assess the usability and accessibility of the products addressed by the project. The objective is to identify user problematics (pain points) which can be addressed by user interface software solutions and enhanced design approaches.

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