Goal Mapping using Task Analysis

Task analysis is a robust methodology for understanding your users and mapping their goals to your business objectives.

Task analysis examines how the users of your product perform the everyday work that is critical to their interaction with your product. This is achieved by breaking your users' relevant actions down into atomic tasks, and then rebuilding these tasks into one or more structured mental models detailing, at a glance, how your users think. This model forms the foundation for a solid, extensible information architecture for your product.

We also compare these mental models against the business goals of your product, using a method called gap analysis, to understand where your product is under-delivering on its users expectations and where you may be concentrating effort unnecessarily.

Task Analysis differs from typical site architecture exercises, which rely solely on architects' intuition, prototyping and usability testing. Task analysis helps your information architects and interface developers get "outside the box" by focusing on underlying operational problems to solve, rather than implementation problems. By collaborating with your entire team, we help you consider the architecture from new perspectives, ultimately making a superior experience for the end users and making the design team and stakeholders more confident in their design.

Deliverables from this process include interview transcripts, a large-scale visualization of your users' mental model for the task or tasks at hand, and gap analysis of your user's needs against the services your business provides.

During a typical task analysis we will:

• Collect and organize product requirements. We focus on more than the list of desired functions, investigating the stated and implicit factors that your company considers to be most important in the product's success.
• Define an optimal user profile and recruit people who match it. Starting from the general target market, we carefully select the aspects of your audience that are most important to the product, creating a profile of the users whose perspectives and comments will give you the most "bang for the buck."
• Conduct in-depth user interviews to understand how people approach the work that your product is designed to assist in. Our partners are experienced task analysis interviewers, focusing interviews on understanding how people perform their work, how they think about it, and the interaction of the various facets of their work. We will capture this information in the user's own vocabulary.
• Analyze our in-depth notes from the user interviews to extract common atomic actions, needs and their relationships. This analysis leads to "mental model" visualizations that clearly depict how audiences approach their work.
• Create a gap analysis of the users' needs and expectations and the services your product provides. This step clearly defines how well your product matches audience needs, and outlines opportunities for your company to empower users. It also provides a model for organizing the content of your site.
• Based on these analyses, develop and present recommendations for changes to the product and document them through reports, wireframes or other diagrams, as appropriate.

For more information on having us perform task analysis for your company, please contact us.

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