CS160 Discussion Section 6
Task Analysis Postmortem
David Sun
March 06, 2007
Contextual Inquiry and Task Analysis
• Pre-inquiry questions
– carefully selecting these questions
• don’t say too much about what your project is about, e.g.,
our goal is to create a novel application to better support
classroom/home maintenance/physical activities.
• shouldn’t describe the application platform, e.g. we are going
to use PDA/cellphone to better support these activities.
• shouldn’t ask users whether and how they go about
performing various tasks.
– biasing your respondents: demand response
– leave more project specific questions to the after-inquiry
debrief
• Explaining what changed between inquiries
– be sure to explain exactly what changed and why
Contextual Inquiry
• Observe people because what they say they do and
what they actually do are often different.
• Make sure you really follow the contextual inquiry
principles:
– Master-apprentice relationship; stay away from
interviewer/interviewee relationship: you aren’t there to
get a list of questions answered.
– Stay in context: gather ongoing experience rather than
summary experience, i.e., it’s not an questionnaire.
– Alternate between watching and probing, i.e., it’s not an
observational study; work with customers to obtain a shared
understanding of the work structure.
– Design ideas are the end product of a chaining of reasoning:
verify your interpretation of data with the user.
Contextual Inquiry
Where does contextual inquiry fit in?
Interviews
(Process
influenced more
by designers)
Contextual inquiry
(Process influenced
by both designers
and end-users)
Observations
(Process
influenced more
by end-users)
Karen Holtzblatt and Sandra Jones. Conducting and Analyzing a Contextual
Interview. In Schuler and Namioka, Participatory Design: Principles and Practices,
Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1993, pp. 177, 181-188, 192-204, 207-210.
Task Analysis
• If respondents performed tasks they don’t
normally do, be careful about drawing
conclusions.
• Tasks should be instantiated after synthesizing
your contextual inquiry data.
Lo-Fi Prototyping
• Pros and cons to
making lo-fi
prototype to scale
• But should have the
“frame” and buttons
to help test users
identify with
PDA/Cellphone
Lo-Fi Prototyping Tips
• Articulate your design decisions:
– Demonstrate your design is informed by the inquiry
study, not based on intuition alone.
– Refer to your task analysis data.
– Be specific and concrete.
– 50% of the overall marks.
• Basic rhetorical writing
– Making a case
• Give evidence
• Show the reasoning from evidence to conclusion.
– Writing in an organized fashion
• Section headings
• Transition sentences
Administrivia
• Create a website for your project if you
haven’t
– Email us with the URL.
• Class participation
– Best to write a note (paper/email) to me
immediately after class.
• Midterm review section next week
– Email me in advance if you’d like certain topics
to be covered.
• Team evaluation due 3/12.