Use CogTool Today
You can use CogTool today, as is, to mock-up a variety of UIs and get reliable predictions of how long a skilled user would take to accomplish tasks on those UIs.
The psychological theory that underlies CogTool's predictions of skilled execution time is called the Keystroke-Level Model, created by Stu Card, Tom Moran and Allen Newell in the 1980s and has been validated through decades of research and documented in over 100 research publications. The predictions can be trusted to be within 20% of the what you could measure if you trained users in your new designs, practiced them until they were skilled, and ran controlled time-on-task studies. CogTool has increased the accuracy of the KLM because it applies the theory more consistently through its "modeling by demonstration" approach, and has been reported to be within about 10% of empirical data.
Use CogTool to benchmark competitors' products, or your own earlier versions, to be sure that your new design will be more efficient for skilled users. Use CogTool to explore a large design space and only invest in testing a few of the more promising ideas with users. Use CogTool to analyze a current product to find efficiency bottlenecks and focus your redesign efforts. CogTool does not replace user testing, but it brings a complementary analytic technique to the UI design toolbox.
The "Use CogTool Today" section includes:
- Download CogTool to get CogTool for Mac or PC.
- Documentaton and Other Support to get the User Guide and other instructional materials.
- Examples to CogTool files with worked-out examples.
- Experience Reports to see what others have done with CogTool.
- Participate by sharing your questions, experiences, data, or improvements.