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So, task analysis is an 
extremely important technique.

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And, to be clear, you can do your task analysis when you do your regular user research

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and interview observation; that's the observation side.

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That's where you ask a user, "Hey can you show me how you do it today?"

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Now, don't worry about the technology; 
don't worry about any tools they may be using

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– you know – existing applications or whatever. Just have them go through what they normally do.

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It's even great in task analysis to see things in the absence of some technology like your design or whatever.

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So, if they want to show you how they 
normally do it, then you'll get to see their kind of workarounds,

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their patterns, their shadow spreadsheets – you know – ways of coping,

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their hacks and their adjustments, things they've done to make it work.

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And that stuff is just beautiful. But having them step through their problem solving step by step,

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kind of 'teach me how you do it' – that's the basis of task analysis.

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If you're doing *ethnography*, which is similar to interview observation

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– you're essentially looking 
for a few more cultural cues with ethnography;

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you're looking for things of cultural significance, and it might just be user culture.

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It might be in that region of the country you're learning about the users.

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Or it might be at a national level or international level if you're doing localization or cross-cultural research.

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It might even be the culture of an underrepresented group if you're doing inclusive research

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and inclusive design, trying to understand the experience of that community,

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their history, their lived experience as it relates to

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the problem they're trying to solve or how they approach it.

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So, task analysis is definitely one of these things 
that you want to build into your tool set.

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And essentially what you're going to do is take those observations from your research

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and you're going to map them out and kind of flow chart them, flow diagram them

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and see how you can take that structure and map it to your design

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kind of like as the user goes from here to here to here,

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how can my screen support this thing that they do 
here with this tool or this feature?

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Kind of see how you can make it flow much more intuitively

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so it feels good and makes sense to your users.