Task Analysis: Understanding People's Jobs through Docsity.com, Slides of Human Resource Management

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chapter 15

task models

What is Task Analysis?

Methods to analyse people's jobs:

• what people do
• what things they work with
• what they must know

Approaches to task analysis

• Task decomposition
  • splitting task into (ordered) subtasks
• Knowledge based techniques
  • what the user knows about the task and how it is organised
• Entity/object based analysis
  • relationships between objects, actions and the people who perform them
• lots of different notations/techniques

general method

• observe
• collect unstructured lists of words and actions
• organize using notation or diagrams

Task Decomposition

Aims:

describe the actions people do

structure them within task subtask hierarchy

describe order of subtasks

Variants:

Hierarchical Task Analysis (HTA)

most common

CTT (CNUCE, Pisa)

uses LOTOS temporal operators

Textual HTA description

Hierarchy description ...

1. in order to clean the house
   1. get the vacuum cleaner out
   2. get the appropriate attachment
   3. clean the rooms 3.1. clean the hall 3.2. clean the living rooms 3.3. clean the bedrooms
   4. empty the dust bag
   5. put vacuum cleaner and attachments away

... and plans Plan 0: do 1 - 2 - 3 - 5 in that order. when the dust bag gets full do 4 Plan 3: do any of 3.1, 3.2 or 3.3 in any order depending on which rooms need cleaning

N.B. only the plans denote order

Tasks as explanation

• imagine asking the user the question:

what are you doing now?

• for the same action the answer may be:

typing ctrl-B

making a word bold

emphasising a word

editing a document

writing a letter

preparing a legal case