A Task Analytic Approach to Dialogue Design

Publisher Summary This chapter discusses the analytic approach to dialogue design. The task analytic approach to dialogue design has been developed to ensure constructive user involvement and an intrinsically strong relationship between operational requirements and dialogue design. The analytic products are relevant to design because they are in a form readily usable by software engineers and they are available prior to software design commitment. As such, the data go beyond the typical human factors role in manpower, training, and logistic subsystem development; they rather become important as a design catalyst, and they define procedures for operational testing and evaluation. Analytic methods, however complete and consistent, cannot replace the experience and expertise of a system designer or the iterative prototyping and testing typical of any system development effort. The dialogue design process remains an art and a science.