The Role of Task Analysis in the Design of Software

Publisher Summary Task analysis is one of the most useful tools in the human factors repertoire. Task analysis has been used for everything, from identifying problems that would cause repetitive strain injuries to improving safety procedures in nuclear power plants. The goal of the task analysis is to enumerate all of the tasks that need to be done in the domain, whether they can be done with the software system or not. This chapter discusses three areas where task analysis can be useful to the user interface designer: an overall task analysis of the domain of interest, done early in the life cycle to determine features and task flow for the product; the use of task scenarios to explore specific user interface decisions in the product, both at the design stage and as an evaluation methodology; and the use of micro-task-analysis as a way of managing specific user interface requests throughout the life cycle of the product. This chapter focuses on using task analysis to help design software for complex unstructured tasks, where there is not a specific order in which tasks are performed, where a great deal of human judgment goes into what happens next.