Abstract
The HCI community advocates task analysis as a useful technique for user requirements analysis and system design, and has shown that task models should be developed collaboratively with users. The question of the usability and readability of task models for end-users is therefore an important one. In addition, we were specifically interested in this question in the context of our current project, Isolde*. Isolde is an authoring tool for technical writers whose user interface relies heavily on a specific task notation, DIANE+. We undertook an empirical study aimed at testing the readability and usability of DIANE+. Two experimental tasks are performed by end-users with no previous exposure to task models. Results show that DIANE+ is largely readable but that its usability is somewhat more problematic. This can be attributed to the task description notation rather than to the concepts themselves.
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Ozkan, N., Paris, C., Balbo, S. (1998). Understanding a Task Model: An Experiment. In: Johnson, H., Nigay, L., Roast, C. (eds) People and Computers XIII. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-3605-7_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-3605-7_8
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