Re: newbie

Jill
You're too ambitious on the practical work - you won't have time to
build two web-sites.

An easier tactic is to find a simple e-commerce site, eg, for car or van
hire.   Then carry out your own HTA and identify misfit between your
model and the site.  Then carry out some focused user testing to see
whether and to what extent this misfit matters.  Often it doesn't.
Sometimes people can adapt, others they can't.  If I knew which happened
when I'd be very rich by now ...

For reading, see the Benyon-Diaper debate in Interacting with Computers
several years back, and the more recent Scenarios debate (also IwC)
involving Carroll, Benyon and Diaper.  www.hcibib.org should get you to
these, if not go and ask a librarian for help (I'm too busy).

Dix et al is a good basic textbook with a good chapter on HTA.  Beyond
this, look for Diaper's old edited book on task analysis.

Alternatives/complements to HTA are personas, scenarios and contextual
design - lots of material on the web on all of these.  There is also
a substantial critique of task based approaches - look for work by
Suchman, Shapiro, Bannon, Bodker, again start with www.hcibib.org and
look for papers that mention task analysis or representations of work
in their title.  There was a CACM special issue on the latter.

Good luck
Gilbert

> "The use of Hierarchical Task Analysis greatly clarifies the
users' needs in
> designing computer software"
>
> Discuss this statement using examples, hypothetical or practical, to
> illustrate the points made.
>
> I thought you might be able to help me define a good practical experiment I
> could do.  I am able to design websites so I thought I might design two -
> one using a Task Analysis and one not, and then getting a group of users to
> test it and from the answers find out the outcome of using task analysis
> :-/.......  However, I wanted your guidance on that as I think I may be
> missing the point (I am new to this :-) ).

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