Applying Task Analysis to Facilitate the Design of Context-Aware Technologies

Current research in design of Context-Aware applications appears very technology focused, in particular software and sensor development and deployment rather than utilizing Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) principles such as task analysis to assist design of the applications. Developers specify what context-aware behavior to implement and determine what context information is needed based on intuition and introspection when they design applications of this kind. As a result, users of context-aware applications may have to repair the inappropriate predictions which the applications make about based upon likely user tasks, and immediate environments. This paper describes the approach of utilizing Hierarchical Task Analysis (HTA) to analyze the interaction between users and context-aware applications. The purpose of this research was to address the issue that there is not enough knowledge about where to discover and how to exploit context information. This is arguably the biggest obstacle when designing this type of applications. Case studies on analyzing existing context-aware applications are presented. The intention is to demonstrate the effectiveness and indicate the limitations of using HTA to better understand contextaware interaction. It is important to stress that we intend to exploit existing task analysis techniques instead of creating a new approach to validate existing context-aware applications. HTA provides an easy entry level for developers who have little knowledge about task analysis to inspect the existing context-aware applications and understand what previous developers of the applications consider context information and how they transform the information as input to their applications. This paper also describes a hybrid task analysis approach for modeling context and facilitating design of applications of this type. A case study is presented to validate this approach.