Cognitive walkthrough of a learning management system with gendered personas

The GenderMag cognitive walkthrough with gendered personas has been developed as an inspection method to improve the usability of software artefacts for diverse user groups. It can be used by design teams to evaluate their software and find usability issues. We studied the effectiveness of this method in 49 sessions with IT professionals and software engineering students. They used the method to find usability issues with a learning management system - some of them working with the persona displaying characteristics that are more commonly found in females ("Sarah"), the others with the persona that had attributes more typical for males ("Tim"). Quantitative and qualitative analyses were conducted and showed the effectiveness of the method when using the persona Sarah, with participants finding more usability issues and invoking the persona more often.