Lecture 4 Flashcards
What is Task Analysis and Modelling and what are they used for?
Used to investigate, organise and represent knowledge about users’ activities. They are made up of:
- Goal: the desired state of a system
- Task: the structured ‘sequence’ of actions performed to achieve a goal.
Task Analysis:
Analysing your user research data (e.g. interviews, observations) to find out about tasks.
Task Modelling:
Representing results of Task Analysis as Task Models
There are two types of Task Models:
- Specific Task Model - describes one instance of a task as performed by one person
- Generic Task Model - generalises across many instances to represent the variations in the task
What questions are you addressing when doing Task Analysis and Modelling?
- What people are trying to achieve
- What they do
- Why they do it
- What things they work with
- What they know
What are the two main approaches of Task Analysis and Modelling
- Action-based - focuses on the observable behaviour of users e.g. Hierarchical Task Analysis (HTA)
- Cognitive - focuses on the cognitive aspects of users’ tasks. Typically focuses on the knowledge the user has of the task they are performing (e.g. Goals, Operations, Methods and Selection rules (GOMS))
What is a HTA plan and how do you do it?
The order in which users undertake subtasks is described in a plan.
High level task -> Sub Tasks -> Actions
- Identify users; select representatives; identify main tasks of concern.
- Design and conduct user research to get information about GOALS, ACTIVITIES, REASONS and INFORMATION.
- Analyse the data to create specific task models initially. Consider decomposition of tasks, balance of model, stopping rules.
- Generalise across the specific task models to create a generic task model.
- Check models with users, other stakeholders and iterate.
What are the limitations of Task Analysis and Models?
- Poor at capturing contextual information.
- Action-based techniques are poor at capturing the ‘why’ information.
- Can encourage a focus on getting the model and notation ‘right’ which detracts from the content.
- Danger of designing systems which place too much emphasis on current tasks or which are too rigid in the ways they support tasks.
What are requirements and requirements specification?
Requirements are a more formal approach to defining how a proposed product should behave, appear or perform.
Requirements engineering is the process of establishing the requirements and writing a requirements spec.
There are 3 types of requirements what are they?
- Functional requirements
- Data requirements
- Non-function requirements (performance, usability, UX, security, reliability, safety etc)
There are 6 common types of requirements: functional, data, environment, user, usability and user experience.
What typically are Usability and UX requirements?
Acceptable levels of user performance and satisfaction with the product - learnability, flexibility, performance, enjoyment, error rates etc.
Where do requirements come from and what should they cover? How would you discover them?
- User research
- Stakeholders
- Business goals, competitor analysis
- Domain experts
They should cover the entire product.
- To discover requirements use:
- Interviews, observations and questionnaires
- Empathy probes
- Contextual inquiry
- Semi structured interview method, used to obtain information about the context of use. Users are first asked a set of standard questions and then observed and questioned while they work in their own environments.
- Contextual inquiry uses a model of master/apprentice to structure data gathering, based on the idea that the interviewer (apprentice) is immersed in the world of the user (master), creating an attitude of sharing and learning on either side.
- Brainstorming
- You then bring requirements to life using personas and scenarios
Summarise “How Effective UX Teams Generate Ideas”.
- Only 15% of those surveyed felt that their ideation process was “very effective”.
- The largest group considered their process “somewhat effective”.
- Most people stated that they needed less than 3 hours to conduct an ideation session.
- Most respondents reported that they avoided large group sessions
- “Somewhat effective” ideations teams results contained a higher proportion of individual ideators.
- Those with very effective idea-generation processes collaborate more often and rely less on individual ideation.
- Whenever possible, aim to include at least one other person in your ideation process.
Ideation Challenges:
No time
- Was the most common complaint. However, results from the survey showed that these teams were not spending less time on ideation compared with the other respondents. Therefore it’s not about how much time you dedicate to ideation; it’s about what you do during that time.
Lack of managerial support
- as the second most common complaint.
Not enough research
- Not enough time to conduct user research to set the context for ideation.
Group-Dynamics Issues
- Ideation sessions ended with someone feeling angry, frustrated, self-conscious, or ignored.
“Very effective” ideation responders have ideation sessions after conducting user research, but before prototyping.
Those who perceived their ideation process was very effective had the highest percentage of respondents gathering inspiration from UX research.
Those who perceive their ideation process as very effective engage in significantly more written ideation
Here are the best practices that emerge from our study of very effective ideation in the UX design process:
• Conduct ideation early in the design lifecycle.
• Make sure that at least some of the ideation sessions involve several people.
• Look to multiple sources of inspiration, and make sure to include user research as one of these.
• Employ structured ideation techniques.
• Use some amount of written ideation.
• Have a designated facilitator.
• Ideation sessions can be short (<3 hours), but for optimal success ideation does require a time budget and management support.
