Course Project

User Testing Using Cognitive Architecture

Timeline

4 weeks

Tools

ACT-R (Cognitive Architecture)

Python

What I Worked On

I created a cognitive model in ACT-R to model the impact of adaptive menus on user performance/behavior and designed an experiment using Python to run the model on.

You can check out the implementation here and my final results report here.

CHALLENGES/LEARNINGS

💻 Technical Perspective

This project was interesting because I'd never really considered the more technical perspective of human-computer interaction. As a designer, I was aware of the value of user testing, but didn't realize that there were tools we could leverage to gain some perspective on user behavior even if there were no available participants to test on. Leveraging a cognitive model to act as a user and being able to quickly run multiple trials of a task can be very valuable in predicting user response to a new feature/product.