Proceedings of the 3rd annual conference on Task models and diagrams

For a long time it has been widely agreed upon that it is fundamental to capture the essence of the users' tasks to better inform the user interface design process and to improve interactive systems' usability. However, we had to wait until the first event of this series (TAMODIA 2002 in Romania) to see a conference entirely dedicated to task analysis and modelling.The TAMODIA conference series encourages the exchange of ideas on recent advances in Task Modelling and more precisely on Diagrammatic notations for task modelling. Interest in this field has continued to grow vigorously from psychology, ergonomics and Human-Computer Interaction communities.This is the third year this annual event has been held and the programme reflects the broad scope of this field. The papers that will be presented describe recent advances in Task analysis and diagrams for task models as well as Tools and approaches for task modelling. The programme is also populated by several papers dealing with the integration of task modeling within the development process of interactive systems and more precisely, Task patterns for user interface design, Taskbased design and Task-based Generation of the User Interface. A set of papers dealing with the specific aspect of Task Models for Groupware and multitasking is also included in the proceedings.We were pleased with the many high quality papers the event attracted. These papers represent an excellent cross section of the work going on in academia and, to a lesser extent, in industry in most parts of the world including Europe, South America and North America. With the papers selected and the 2 invited speakers, the conference provides a balanced picture of current trends and challenges in a quite old but still very active field. The conference presents a good contrast and complements with more established work that has been gathered in the recent excellent book "The Handbook of Task Analysis for Human Interaction" edited by Dan Diaper in late 2003 (ISBN 0805844325).You will find in the proceedings 20 full papers that have been selected according to high quality criteria among the 42 submissions. The papers have only been reviewed by the programme committee members.