Move task flow analysis to Interpretation

[pglevy]

I probably assumed this was an "analysis" activity, but upon further review, it's actually more of a system design mapping activity based on user research/observation. So it probably belongs in the Interpretation category and maybe needs to be renamed as well. (Intermediate step before journey map, user flows for interaction design.)

[pglevy]

A brief investigation into the terminology indicates this is more complicated than I originally thought, but I have some recommendations for moving forward.

Resources:

• This is a helpful article that discusses the various terms and why it gets confusing.

Thoughts:

• "Task analysis" is a way of describing "what people do." I think the discovery of this information is implied and embedded within the other activities that we carry out in Awareness and Observation, such as interviews, contextual inquiry, etc.
• What is probably more useful for our purposes is to describe the output/artifact from our various analysis activities in a way that can help the team visualize what people go through to accomplish various tasks and what we can do to make it better.
• I find myself aligned with the thinking expressed by Alexey Kolchenko in this conversation: task flow and user flow are interchangeable in practical use, and since we are UX designers generally focused on the user perspective, the term "user flow" is a better term for us.
• Flowmapp (the tool we may end up using regularly for this method) describes their feature as "User Flow" and defines it this way: "User Flow is the logic path taken by users on a website or app to achieve goals. The User Flow leads them from entry point through set of steps towards a successful final action, such as purchasing a product." I think this is pretty consistent with most of the language that is current in the Task Analysis method.
• In general, I think we can keep it pretty broad: visualizing how a person interacts with a system to accomplish a goal. This is essentially what interaction design is. I don't think we have to be too opinionated about whether this method includes a step-by-step single path or includes branching or includes system actions or none of these things.

Recommendations:

• Change the name of the method from "Task flow analysis" to "User flow diagramming."
• Remove the reference to the searchenginewatch.com article. (It's just a bunch of annoying pop-ups.)
• Add reference to UX Flows, and Why They’re So Confusing, not so much for getting the terminology right, but as a good overview of a number of ways to approach flows.
• Leave most of the core method content as is.

I'll drafting some of those minor changes, but let me know if you have initial thoughts on anything in this comment. @sofya-UX @allie-shaw

[pglevy]

Here is a draft of the text on a new branch. I made some minor tweaks so it was consistent with how it referred "analysis" and "diagram."

Here's a screenshot of it running locally...

[pglevy]

Any final thoughts on this one before I close it out, @Bixal/methods ?

[allie-shaw]

This looks good too. Thanks @pglevy !

[sofya-UX]

Looks good to me as well @pglevy