I’ve been spending a lot of time recently trying to improve some core steps in my design process, and this includes looking at the deliverables I produce.
One area that has been of particular interest is Task Analysis.
Oddly, there doesn’t seem to be much great information out there on the topic, and even fewer really cool examples of how people are representing it… it isn’t exactly the sexiest part of the design process. The one exception is the Compiled Task Analysis Grid by Todd Zaki Warfel, which I’m sure everyone has seen. I think this rocks!
Most of the other examples out there seem to be simple flowcharts, or, even worse, dreaded spreadsheets.
So I went ahead and created my own.
I started first with the content that I wanted to capture (in somewhat of an order).
- Task Name — an important element, obviously! :)
- Performer — who is doing the task, persona or role (can be more than one)
- Task Occurrence Frequency — how often does someone do this? Hourly, Daily, Weekly, Monthly, Ad-Hoc, etc.
- Duration — how long does this task take?
- Importance — is this s prerequisite for something else? Why do they do this?
- Cognitive Load — how taxing is it?
- Collaborators — is anyone else involved? Should there be anyone else involved?
- Location — where do they do this?
- Task Description — a short, outcome-based, description
- Trigger — what causes them to do it
- Activities — manual & mental (what are the steps to completion)
- Info Needed — what do they have? What do they need? What is it? Where is it?
- Value — what purpose does it serve
- Outcome — what does success look like?
- What’s Next — what do they do afterwards (What, So What, Now What?)
- Automation — Can it be automated or obliterated?
- What is the Experience — current & future, how challenging is it today? What opportunities are there to improve the experience. Stuff to build an experience map (thinking, feeling, doing, etc.)
- Sub-tasks — what are the sub-tasks, if any?
- Variations — are there other ways to perform the task?
- Part of something larger — Is this part of a process or activity?
Once the tasks are compiled, you can do several things
- Create Scenarios for Design Studio Sketching
- Compile them into a task list for prioritization (impact & frequency of use)
The Prioritization is key, obviously!
Here is the model I came up with to document the tasks.
What I like about this format is it is fairly simple to begin prioritization. You can print these out and give them to people to sort them. You could also create a 2x2 matrix and plot them with the X Axis being Frequency, and the Y Axis being Importance.
NOTE: an editable version of this template is available as part of the Thinking Sheets toolkit on ThinkingSheets.com
What do you think? Missing stuff? Do you have another way to do this?
