Chapter 3

chapter 3: Task Analysis

Chapter 3 discusses task analysis, and what are the important things to be done when analyzing user tasks. Please note that I use the letter p to refer to page numbers.

P52: What is task analysis? identifying and analysing user goals and tasks.
P53: This book use the term “procedural analysis” to describe the detailed level analysis of tasks; like dividing tasks into subtasks and decomposing them into steps and decisions.


Identify user goals:

• User goals are less likely to be changes!
• Understanding task analysis at the predesign stage
• talk to users, watch them do the work even if its not optimal way, talk to experts, observe errors and workarounds

Identify user goals → tasks → actions

User Goals:(a) user goals
(b) companies goals
Sometimes (a) and (b) match each other, but sometimes they do not!  Both can be addressed by improving the usability of the product. Goals are not necessary named user's and companies; example: buyer’s goals and seller’s goals; they carry the same idea but with different naming.

For every goal (p55) we need to:

• Relate goals to their tasks and then to their actions: figure (3-1). P56: lists the seven steps of relating goals to their tasks.
• How people react to achieve goals and perform tasks. (example at p57)
• Seeing how users choose tasks to meet their goals: users have options to choose what tasks they use to achieve their goals. (maybe several tasks with different ways can achieve the same goal)
• Seeing how users handle any problems
• Making sure to keep goals as a part of the task analysis

To perform task analysis, we should perform the following steps:

1. Workflow analysis: how work gets done when several people are involved (p61). A set of steps are formed for every process.
2. Job analysis: what a single individual does through the day, month, year. Understanding what every employee does in his/her daily would help to identify some design decisions that help in easing their work. Another important issue about tasks is to check their: frequently, critically, duration, difficulty.
3. Later, analyst should combine the workflow analysis with the job analysis results.
4. Task list (or task inventories): what tasks are performed by any user. Task list does not tell you how to achieve the task, it just tells you what will be achieved using the task.
5. Process analysis, task sequence: the order in which users do tasks.
6. Task hierarchies: what subtasks every task has (divided in chunks). Job → tasks → subtasks (example figure 3-11 p74).
7. Procedural analysis: what are the steps and decisions user take to accomplish a task (or subtask) (figure 3-12)

One more important thing about task analysis is to identify and understand the potential user types. User types and stages are as follows: 

• Novice, 
• Advanced beginner, 
• Competent performer, 
• and expert.