A Flexible Methodology and Support Environment for Building Task Models

Task modelling helps to ensure the usability of interactive systems by producing models that are useful for a variety of reasons, and by forcing designers to view the system from the users’ point of view. Unfortunately, it is a difficult process, so most designers either don’t do it at all, or they model only certain aspects of the system, potentially using different formalisms that are hard to consolidate. As a result, acomplete and coherent model of all the levels of a system is seldom if ever built. To address this problem, this paper proposes a flexible methodology for the construction of task models and an environment that supports this methodology. The methodology, which is based on industrial experience, identifies a sequence of levels for which models should be built, and the environment provides tools for building them, either from scratch or from existing sources.

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