The Usability Engineering Lifecycle: A Practitioner's Handbook for User Interface Design

By Deborah J. Mayhew

Chapter 7: Work Reengineering

Chapter 7: Work Reengineering

Purpose

In a previous task, Contextual Task Analysis, you obtained several models of how users as a group currently think about, do, and talk about the work you are automating. First, you extracted a Current User Task Organization, which described how users organize all their low-level tasks. This model is most often a hierarchy, but can take other forms (see Chapter 3 ). The model includes terminology that users currently use to name tasks and task groupings. You also obtained Task Scenarios describing actual procedures for accomplishing tasks as they are currently done. If your project is following the OOSE methodology, at this point you also have a collection of documented Use Cases, formulated by consolidating data from individual Task Scenarios, which describe generalized procedures for tasks as they are currently done. These models correspond roughly to the development of the Requirements Model in the Analysis phase of OOSE (see Jacobson et al. 1992, 156?74), and you will recall the parallels between OOSE concepts (Actors and Use Cases) and Usability Engineering concepts (user categories and Task Scenarios).

It is important to understand here that the purpose of the Contextual Task Analysis is not to understand current work practice so as to simply mimic it in product design. In the words of Button and Dourish (1996), you want to ". . . align system design not so much with the details of specific working practices , as with the details of the means by...

< Previous Excerpt Next Excerpt >

Purchase This Book

The Usability Engineering Lifecycle: A Practitioner's Handbook for User Interface Design

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter 7: Work Reengineering

Contact Preferences

This is embarrasing...

Customize Your GlobalSpec Experience

Select Your Free Newsletters

Industry Newsletters

Select Your Free Product Alerts

This is embarrasing...