So, task analysis is an extremely important technique. And, to be clear, you can do your task analysis when you do your regular user research and interview observation; that's the observation side. That's where you ask a user, "Hey can you show me how you do it today?" Now, don't worry about the technology; don't worry about any tools they may be using
– you know – existing applications or whatever. Just have them go through what they normally do. It's even great in task analysis to see things in the absence of some technology like your design or whatever. So, if they want to show you how they normally do it, then you'll get to see their kind of workarounds, their patterns, their shadow spreadsheets – you know – ways of coping, their hacks and their adjustments, things they've done to make it work.
And that stuff is just beautiful. But having them step through their problem solving step by step, kind of 'teach me how you do it' – that's the basis of task analysis. If you're doing *ethnography*, which is similar to interview observation – you're essentially looking for a few more cultural cues with ethnography; you're looking for things of cultural significance, and it might just be user culture. It might be in that region of the country you're learning about the users.
Or it might be at a national level or international level if you're doing localization or cross-cultural research. It might even be the culture of an underrepresented group if you're doing inclusive research and inclusive design, trying to understand the experience of that community, their history, their lived experience as it relates to the problem they're trying to solve or how they approach it. So, task analysis is definitely one of these things that you want to build into your tool set.
And essentially what you're going to do is take those observations from your research and you're going to map them out and kind of flow chart them, flow diagram them and see how you can take that structure and map it to your design kind of like as the user goes from here to here to here, how can my screen support this thing that they do here with this tool or this feature? Kind of see how you can make it flow much more intuitively
so it feels good and makes sense to your users.