Stumbling Blocks and Alternative Paths: Reconsidering the Walkthrough Method for Analyzing Apps

Abstract

The walkthrough method was developed as a way to trace an app or platform’s technological mechanisms and cultural references to understand how it guides users. This article explores the method’s enduring strengths and emergent weaknesses regarding technological advances and developments in app studies. It engages with adjacent methods for understanding apps’ intensifying structural and economic complexity, datafication, algorithmic logic, and personalization as well as approaches fostering a feminist ethics of care toward users. Considering these perspectives, the article discusses challenges encountered in teaching the method and applying it to algorithmically driven apps. With TikTok as a central example, examining the walkthrough process demonstrates the method’s incongruence for investigating several aspects of the app, especially its automated personalization. These challenges highlight the need to combine, supplement, or exchange the method with other approaches as part of an expanding and flexible toolkit of methods in app studies.