Comparative Cognitive Task Analysis
Abstract
It is easy to force a weather forecaster to work out of context -- simply move him or her to some new locale. Effects of ocean currents, seasonal variations, and effects of land masses change everything. Any knowledge of trends that the forecaster had relied on are now utterly useless. The information that the weather forecaster uses is often downloaded from external Web sites. Local weather organizations use (or build) support tools for displaying downloaded data and images and for building and displaying their own forecasts. To optimize these tools, consideration must be given to the user-tooltask triad that is central to the principles of human-centered computing (HCC). The traditional way human factors engineers approach this problem is to perform a task analyses to determine how people operate in a specific domain on a specific task. Cognitive Task Analysis (CTA) is a set of methods that takes into account the perception (i.e., vision), cognition (i.e., decision making), and motor actions (i.e., mouse movements) needed to accomplish a task. In this chapter, we build on CTA methods by suggesting that comparative cognitive task analysis (C2TA) can help solve the aforementioned problems. C2TA is based on replication studies conducted in different environments. Because it derives data from more than one environment, C2TA provides insight into interface design that single-site studies and individual CTA methods cannot.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Jan 01, 2007
- Accession Number
- ADA480014
Entities
People
- Elizabeth Pratt
- J. G. Trafton
- Susan S. Kirschenbaum
Organizations
- Naval Undersea Warfare Center