data model capture projects tasks and sub tasks

DATA MODEL CAPTURE PROJECTS TASKS AND SUB TASKS SOFTWARE

The structured breakdown of the task into its subtasks describes each interaction in detail. The diagram shows how the high?level steps of a task relate to one another. Select the country from the drop-down list.Ĭombining different approaches to describing user interactions provides an understanding of tasks that is both broad and deep.Optional: Locate the Address Line 2 field.

To illustrate, Subtask 1.4, “Complete address,” would break down as follows: A more complete task analysis would ultimately get down to the level of user interactions. However, it does give a clear understanding of the task’s high-level steps. It does not communicate anything about what is happening at the level of a user’s interaction with the system. This hierarchical task analysis is very coarse from a user experience standpoint. In this hierarchical task analysis, I’ve broken this task down into subtasks, expressing the relationships between the parent task and its subtasks through a numbering scheme. Figure 1-Hierarchical task analysis for ordering a book Figure 1 shows a high-level hierarchical task analysis for this task. We’ll consider a common task: ordering a book. Our example is from a hierarchical task analysis I performed to better understand an existing system. Let’s look at an example of a hierarchical task analysis.

detailing the steps users must perform to accomplish their goals.

Hierarchical task analysis requires a detailed understanding of users’ tasks. Applying Hierarchical Task Analysis to User Experience A hierarchical task analysis is an effective means of capturing this information.

DATA MODEL CAPTURE PROJECTS TASKS AND SUB TASKS SOFTWARE

As software engineers are all too aware, the intimate familiarity you may have gained with why users do something in a certain way can quickly fade in just a few days or weeks. Once you’ve created a hierarchical task analysis, it can serve as an effective form of system documentation, enabling developers to rapidly understand how users interact with a system. When analyzing an existing system, it can help you to optimize particular interactions. When designing a new system, hierarchical task analysis lets you explore various possible approaches to completing the same task. In user experience, you can use hierarchical task analysis to describe the interactions between a user and a software system. You can break down these tasks into multiple levels of subtasks.

In its most basic form, a hierarchical task analysis provides an understanding of the tasks users need to perform to achieve certain goals. You can also use this approach to support the UX development process.Ī structured, objective approach to describing users’ performance of tasks, hierarchical task analysis originated in human factors. In this column, I’ll examine one approach to hierarchical task analysis that enables UX designers to quickly understand both what a system does and how its capabilities translate into the system’s user experience. While there are core principles that guide a hierarchical task analysis, it’s possible to adapt the basic approach in a huge number of ways to support the needs of any domain under consideration. This technique has applications across a range of different problem domains, including time-and-motion studies, personnel selection, or training, and provides a broad and deep understanding of task performance. In fact, there are so many that it can sometimes be difficult to decide which tool is most appropriate for a given task! Hierarchical task analysis (HTA) is an underused approach in user experience, but one you can easily apply when either modifying an existing design or creating a new design. As UX professionals, we have a great many analytical and descriptive tools available to us.

Data model capture projects tasks and sub tasks