A specialized cognitive walkthrough to evaluate digital games for the elderly.

Accessibility challenges have risen with the phenomenon of population ageing. Designing digital games that are easy to use and learn for elderly players also challenges the literature. In this context, this study presents a variant of the Cognitive Walkthrough (CW) method to evaluate digital games that consider the cognitive decline during ageing. We did an exploratory analysis by conducting three studies to create adaptions to the CW. We developed two versions of Cognitive Barriers Walkthrough (CBW) to help specialists find the usability problems that can reach the elderly target. For each version, we conducted evaluations with experts and users and compared the problems found by CBW and CW. Both CBW versions found more problems than CW in all our studies. Although observing users during the evaluation process increases the time spent by experts, we noticed that it helps experts find new problems that they did not find previously based only on their own experiences.