Task analysis

Draft

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Introduction

According to Task Analysis (retrieved 16:14, 26 April 2011 (CEST)) “Task analysis involves learning about your users' goals, what they want to do on your Web site and how they work. It can also mean learning about specific task users must do to meet those goals and what steps they take to accomplish those tasks. A task analysis complements a user analysis. [...] Tasks analysis allows you to discover what tasks your Web site must support and to determine the appropriate content scope. It also helps you to decide what applications your Web site should include. It can assist you in refining or re-defining the navigation or search to better support users' goals or to build pages and applications that match users' goals, tasks, and steps.”

According to NASA's Usability toolkit, retrieved 16:14, 26 April 2011 (CEST),

Task analysis defines what a user is required to do in terms of actions and/or cognitive processes to achieve a task. A detailed task analysis can be conducted to understand a system and the information flow within it. These information flows are important to the maintenance of the system. Failure to allocate sufficient resources to this activity increases the potential for costly problems arising in later phases of development. Task analysis makes it possible to design and allocate tasks appropriately within the new system. Once the tasks are defined, the functionality required to support the tasks can be accurately specified.

Software

• TaskArchitect is a task analysis tool.

Links

Short introductions

• Task Analysis

Web sites or links pages

• Task analysis at Dey Alexander Consulting.