Task Analysis and System Design: The Discipline of Data

In the previous issue of Interacting with Computers, I offered a critique of Task Analysis (TA) arguing that, in general, task analysis techniques had failed to appreciate the significance of the shift in emphasis towards logical modelling of the system and away from physical modelling which had taken place during the early 1980s in information systems. As a result TA (if used on its own) would produce poor system designs because it fails to achieve sufficient device independence (Benyon, 1991). In their commentary on this paper, Diaper and Addison (Diaper and Addison, 1991) defended TA in general and TAKD (e.g. Diaper, 1989b) in particular against the criticisms and made a number of assertions about my stance regarding humans and computers.