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Recent criticism of think-aloud testing (TA) discusses discrepancies between theory and practice, the artificiality of the test situation, and inconsistencies in the evaluators' interpretation of the process. Rather than enforcing a more strict TA procedure, we describe Cooperative Usability Testing (CUT), where test users and evaluators join expertise to understand the usability problems of the application evaluated. CUT consists of two sessions. In the interaction session, the test user tries out the application to uncover potential usability problems while the evaluators mainly observe, e.g. as in TA or contextual inquiry. In the interpretation session, evaluators and test users discuss what they consider the most important usability problems, supported by a video of the interaction session. In an exploratory study comparing CUT to TA, seven evaluators find that interpretation sessions contribute important usability information compared to TA. Also test users found participation in the interpretation session interesting.
Frøkjær et al. (Sat,) studied this question.