Workshop with cognitively impaired persons evaluating a website redesign using a clickable mock-up

For the redesign of a website targeting persons with any kind of disability, we worked with a group of people with cognitive disabilities. The goal was to test proposed enhancements to the menu of the website, simplifying the user experience but keeping the modifications small, so that users don't have to relearn how to use the website. We prepared a clickable prototype and had it evaluated by the test persons. The project confirmed that clickable prototypes are a useful tool for such evaluations. It shed light on the way how such persons find their way around a website. They preferred a graphical menu over a textual one. But contrary to our expectations, they ignored moving elements that were thought to focus attention on important content. We also found that a navigation is difficult to be evaluated if the website content is not provided in an easy-to-understand language, because non-easy language content of pages navigated to is not recognized as the desired information. The conclusion contains recommendations about the design of clickable prototypes and about priorities on the website (re)design in general.