WWW Citation Timeline (2004)

Citation Timeline (2004):

Marco A. Winckler, Philippe Palanque, and Carla M. D. S. Freitas. 2004. Tasks and scenario-based evaluation of information visualization techniques. In Proceedings of the 3rd annual conference on Task models and diagrams (TAMODIA '04). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 165-172.

This paper propose a new task visual model to validate other task visual  techniques. Also, it can be used to compare two techniques which one is better in performing user tasks than the other. They start by building multiple user scenario for each task using ConcurTaskTree (CTT) notation. Later, apply all scenarios to each of the selected techniques to evaluate if it serve the needed usability or not. For example, in their case study, they compared accessing and searching files using two techniques: Treemaps, and Hyperbolic browser. One of the techniques did not have all the scenarios. The following paragraphs will explain CTT and how it was used in this work.

ConcurTaskTree (CTT) notation [ref 12] is task modeling technique which model four types tasks as the following:
- Abstract: describes any complex form of actions either by user, system, or both.
- User: describes tasks that are performed only by the user (no system involvement).
- Interactive: describes tasks that include operations by both user and system.
- Application: describes tasks that are entirely performed by the system without user involvement.

CTT is a hierarchical structure where tasks can be linked together if they have any relationships in between. The relationships represented using Language Of Temporal Ordering Specification (LOTOS) operators. Example of such operators are: choice[], enabling >>, task interruption [>. [ref 10] has one tool to edit and write tasks (called CTTE).