Usability – Thinking about User Tasks

A good start to analyzing the flow of your program is to think about the tasks that your users are trying to accomplish with your application.

• Identify the individual tasks the user is trying to solve – This is WHAT the user is trying to do, not HOW the user is doing this. You can start off by thinking about the overall goal of the system and then by breaking it up into smaller subtasks.

• Are there any preconditions or dependencies that need to be figured out to make this task possible? -This can be information that the user needs to supply, or it can also be other tasks (recursion!) that need to be done before this one can be accomplished. One example is that a user must first create an account before they can use their account to log into a website.

• A couple of other things to know about tasks: How often is this task being done? What are the errors that can happen? Or how can it go wrong? Are there any constraints on the task?   And so on..