Re: Product Task Analysis

[Jon at TaskArchitect <jon -at- taskarchitect -dot- com>]

Tony,
You've raised a classic point of contention.

As I see it, hierarchical task analysis has the advantage of portraying the 
user's view of the system.  The approach does rely on the quality of the 
analyst's interviews and data gathering to fully understand the ways that 
the program can be realistically used.  It wll produce a description that 
is user focussed and is easy for readers to understand.

Data flow diagrams are more comprehensive, providing you can elicit the 
information from the designers.  I'm not sure that the output is as easy to 
comprehend, and does not usually show the system in the user's terms.  But 
it may be required to meet the second part of Anna's task - exhaustive 
feature documentation.

Horses for cousres.  We could have a wider discussion about task centered 
vs data centric design - but maybe not in this forum?

Jon


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