Abstract
Task modelling helps to ensure the usability of interactive systems by producing models that are useful for a variety of reasons, and by forcing designers to view the system from the users’ point of view. Unfortunately, it is a difficult process, so most designers either don’t do it at all, or they model only certain aspects of the system, potentially using different formalisms that are hard to consolidate. As a result, acomplete and coherent model of all the levels of a system is seldom if ever built. To address this problem, this paper proposes a flexible methodology for the construction of task models and an environment that supports this methodology. The methodology, which is based on industrial experience, identifies a sequence of levels for which models should be built, and the environment provides tools for building them, either from scratch or from existing sources.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Balbo, S. (1994), Evaluation Ergonomique des Interfaces Utilisateur: Un Pas Vers L’Automatisation, PhD thesis, Universite Grenoble I, France.
Balbo, S. & Lindley, C. (1997), Adaptation of a Task Analysis Methodology to the Design of Decision Support Systems, in S. Howard, J. Hammond & G. K. Lindgaard (eds.), Human-Computer Interaction—INTERACT’ 97: Proceedings of the Sixth IFIP Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, Chapman&Hall, pp.355–61.
Balbo, S., Ozkan, N. & Paris, C. (1998), Task Models in Industrial Context: How do They Fit?, http://www-ihm.lri.fr/ihm98/contributions/. a]Balbo, S., Paris, C. & Ozkan, N. (1999), Characterising Task Formalisms: Towards a Taxonomy, in Proceedings of the ECOOP’99 Workshop on Integrating Human Factors into Use Cases and OO Methods, pp.246–7. http://www.cs.concordia.ca/~faculty/seffah/ecoop/program.htm. Also available as CSIRO/MIS Technical Report 98/221.
Beard, D., Smith, D. & Danelsbeck, K. (1996), QGOMS: A Direct-manipulation Tool for Simple GOMS Models, in G. van der Veer&B. Nardi (eds.), Proceedings of CHI’96: Human Factors in Computing Systems, ACM Press, pp.25–6.
Bentley, T. (2000), Task Modelling Review, Technical Report 2000/155, CSIRO/MIS.
Booch, G., Rumbaugh, J. & Jacobson, I. (1999), The Unified Modelling Language User Guide, Addison-Wesley.
Brun, P. & Beaudouin-Lafon, M. (1995), A Taxonomy and Evaluation of Formalisms for the Specification of Interactive Systems, in M. A. R. Kirby, A. J. Dix & J. E. Finlay (eds.), People and Computers X (Proceedings of HCI’95), Cambridge University Press, pp.197–212.
Card, S. K., Moran, T. P. & Newell, A. (1983), The Psychology of Human-Computer Interaction, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
CTTE (2001), ConcurTaskTrees Environment, http://giove.cnuce.cnr.it/ctte.html.
Harel, D. (1987), “Statecharts: A Visual Formalism for Complex Systems”, Science of Computer Programming 8(3), 231–74.
Hilbert, D. M. & Redmiles, D. F. (2000), “Extracting Usability Information from User Interface Events”, ACM Computing Surveys 32(4), 384–421.
Hix, D. & Hartson, H. R. (1993), Developing User Interfaces: Ensuring Usability through Product and Process, John Wiley&Sons.
Horracks, I. (1999), Constructing the User Interface with Statecharts, Addison-Wesley.
Lu, S., Paris, C. & Vander Linden, K. (1999), Towards the Automatic Generation of Task Models from Object Oriented Diagrams, in P. Dewan & S. Chatty (eds.), Proceedings of the IFIP Working Conference on Engineering for Human-Computer Interaction, Heraklion, Crete, Greece, September 14-18, Kluwer, pp. 169–90.
Palanque, P. A., Bastide, R., Dornte, L. & Sibertin-Blanc, C. (1993), Design of User-driven Interfaces Using Petri Nets and Objects, in C. Rolland, F. Bodart & C. Cauvet (eds.), Proceedings of CAISE’93 (Conference on Advance Information System Engineering), Vol. 685 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer-Verlag, pp.569–85.
Paris, C. & Vander Linden, K. (1996), “An Interactive Support Tool for Writing Multilingual Instructions”, IEEE Computer 29(7), 49–56. Special Issue on Interactive Natural Language Processing.
Paternò, F. (1999), Model-Based Design and Evaluation of Interactive Applications, Springer-Verlag.
Paternò, F. & Mancini, C. (1999), Developing Task Models From Informal Scenarios, in M. W. Altom & M. G. Williams (eds.), Companion Proceedings of CHI’99: Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI’99 Conference Companion), ACM Press. Proceedings of the CHI’99 Workshop “Tool Support for Task-Based User Interface Design”. http://www.upb.de/fachbereich/AG/szwillus/chi99/ws/.
Paternò, F., Ballardin, G. & Mancini, C. (2000), Modelling Multi-Users Tasks, Technical Report, The GUITARE Project. http://giove.cnuce.cnr.it/Guitare/document.html.
Paternò, F., Mancini, C. & Meniconi, S. (1997), ConcurTaskTrees: A Diagrammatic Notation for Specifying Task Models, in S. Howard, J. Hammond & G. K. Lindgaard (eds.), Human-Computer Interaction—INTERACT’ 97: Proceedings of the Sixth IFIP Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, Chapman&Hall, pp.362–9.
Scapin, D. & Pierret-Golbreich, C. (1990), Towards a Method for Task Description: MAD, in L. Berlinguet & D. Berthelette (eds.), Proceedings of Work with Display Unit’ 89, Elsevier Science, pp.371–80.
Sebillotte, S. (1995), Methodology Guide to Task Analysis with the Goal of Extracting Relevant Characteristics for Interfaces, Technical Report Esprit project P6593, INRIA, Rocquencourt, France.
Tarn, R. C., Maulsby, D. & Peurta, A. R. (1998), U-TEL: A Tool for Eliciting User Task Models from Domain Experts, in Proceedings of the International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI’98), pp.77–80.
Tarby, J.-C. & Barthet, M.-F. (1996), The Diane+ Method, in J. Vanderdonckt (ed.), Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Computer-aided Design of User Interfaces (CADUI’96), Presses Universitares de Namur, pp.95–119.
van der Veer, G. C., Hoeve, M.&Lenting, B. F. (1996), Modelling Complex Work Systems—Method meets Reality, in T. R. G. Green, J. J. Cañas & C. P. Warren (eds.), Cognition and the Worksystem, Proceedings of the 8th European Conference on Cognitive Ergonomics (EACE), University of Granada Press, pp.115–20.
van Welie, M., van der Veer, G. C. & Eliens, A. (1998), EUTERPE: Tool Support for Analyzing Co-operative Environments, in T. R. G. Green, L. Bannon, C. Warren & J. Buckley (eds.), Proceedings of the Ninth European Conference on Cognitive Ergonomics, University of Limerick, pp. 109–14.
Vander Linden, K., Paris, C. & Lu, S. (2000), Where Do Instructions Come From: Knowledge Acquisition and Specification for Instructional Text, in T. Becker & S. Busemann (eds.), IMPACTS in Natural Language Generation: NLG Between Technology and Applications, DFKI document D-00-01, pp. 1–10.
Wild, P. J. & Macredie, R. D. (2000), On Change and Tasks, in S. McDonald, Y. Waern & G. Cockton (eds.), People and Computers XIV (Proceedings of HCI’2000), Springer-Verlag, pp.45–59.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2001 Springer-Verlag London
About this paper
Cite this paper
Paris, C., Tarby, JC., Vander Linden, K. (2001). A Flexible Methodology and Support Environment for Building Task Models. In: Blandford, A., Vanderdonckt, J., Gray, P. (eds) People and Computers XV—Interaction without Frontiers. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-0353-0_19
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-0353-0_19
Publisher Name: Springer, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-85233-515-1
Online ISBN: 978-1-4471-0353-0
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive