Cognitive Task Analysis — an effective tool in product design (3 of n — Product management from ground up)

Setting the stage

DPDI is a course by Xperian school aimed at helping design enthusiasts become proficient at solving design problems

Task analysis is not a new term to many but to us at Townscript, it definitely was. Even though we had done it in bits and pieces, as a concept this was still an unknown until recently when we learnt about it in a digital product design course by Xperian school. The philosophy of the school is centered around providing education to designers about the contemporary and basic values of design. Townscript, with an aim to bringing out the most lovable product to its users, focuses heavily on prepping its product team(s) with a consumer focused design culture. With this in mind, I and our UX designer Sanketh Sampara were presented with an opportunity by our co-founder Sachin Sharma.

Sometimes, beautiful things in life turn up in most unexpected ways and so sitting was an email about this course from Sachin in my inbox during my travel to my hometown for a family function. The course’s brochure made an immediate mark with its beautiful content hinting at something that any product designer would love to learn. The answer to the email was plain and simple — “The course content looks really great and could be really helpful for us to enhance these skills. I believe that learning from the classmates would also help in such a case.” and Sachin got the ball rolling with one of the instructors Karthi Subbaraman — a highly experienced human centric experience designer and a visiting faculty in some of the most well-known design schools in India. The course focuses heavily on how cognitive actions in our brain take place whenever we are making decisions or processing information being presented to us by the surroundings. As Karthi says one half of design is understanding the man and other half is translating this understanding into the machine and iterating over these two halves. The course involves several assignments that help us absorb the concepts fast.

Some initial assignments

When starting to learn anything new, it is important to know where you are and where would you like to be and obviously have opportunities to implement whatever you are learning. DPDI provides us with assignments that have really helped us absorb the core concepts of design.

1. Point A: An assessment of where we stand with regards to our understanding of design
2. Point B: A deep dive understanding of where we would want to be after 6 years chalked down carefully and in detail to daily/weekly/monthly/yearly routines that we should follow
3. Problem Statements and Problem Briefs: When you want to design something, it is absolutely important to know exactly the problem that you are designing for. A step-by-step approach to extract a problem statement out of any situation and convert it into a brief that acts as a pitch to all stakeholders to understand who the solution is intended for, what benefits it would have, who are the competitors and so on.
4. Business Elements: An approach to understand the different elements involved in any business to give a good idea to a designer of what the business looks like and what is it at a larger level that his/her design would impact
5. Design Labs: A 10 week project to solve a problem that is close to our heart and that allows us to implement the learnt concepts live
6. Task Analysis and Cognitive Task Analysis: An analysis of all the actions performed by a user while performing a task and the different cognitive actions happening inside the user’s brain at the same time

Task Analysis (& Cognitive Task Analysis)

Task analysis of making tea

The assignment thus read — “Login into Redbus and book a ticket from Pune to Hyderabad for 2 passengers, Male (60 yrs), Female (57 yrs) in an A/C sleeper class, preferably in the night bus which has dinner stops. The boarding point is Pune Railway Station and the dropping point is Suchitra”

As a precursor to this assignment, we learnt about human information processing. My understanding of human information processing goes like this — It starts with getting different stimuli, perceiving them and then processing them based on the situations we are in and the functioning states of our brains to make a decision to act upon the stimuli. We learnt about the fundamentals of visual and cognitive perception as concepts such as similarity, familiarity, proximity, symmetry, affordance, consistency (probably all jargons for someone looking at them for the first time unless you go through the examples to learn what they are and what roles do they play in human information processing and decision making). We also learnt about different types of memory — short term sensory store, short term (aka working) memory, long term memory along with different parts of human brain with their roles and functions in decision making.

With these concepts in mind, we began our assignment on the task analysis of a simple task of booking a bus ticket followed by a cognitive task analysis of a competitor of the problem each one of is solving as a part of the design labs. In essence, below points are what describe a task analysis and cognitive task analysis, according to me (disclaimer: I am only sharing my current understanding of the concept that I expect would change with time).

1. Go through all the screens and parallel screens that are involved in the task at hand
2. Create a flow of (even the parallel flows such as for example if you are on a screen with list of items with details and filters then as a user while you can scan through the list to select one item based on the detail, you can also apply the filter to get a smaller (& probably more relevant) list. You could also remove the filter if you are not satisfied with the resulting list) major and minor actions that a user is most likely to take on these screens
3. At each step, mention the conditions under which certain task would be getting taken (basic if-else conditions)
4. For each screen, list down the elements of visual and cognitive perception (At this point, I prefer to do it via an attempt at imitating a user and in the form of a conversation involving my thoughts as the user) and how they make you process the different information and take an action with the task in mind

Here is the link to what I attempted — https://whimsical.co/LHxFqshi8VmBBK1y8cbciB

A glimpse into dirtying of my hands at this interesting exercise

I also went ahead and did this for 3 major workflows for one of our competitors in the design lab problem space that I am solving.

Signup to host a painting workshop on eventshigh.com as a new user

Actual workshop ticketing creation

I am definitely not sure of whether I did it right or not , but the exercise is definitely fun and is really helpful in understanding how a user might see the different steps or screens of your product. This is something anyone interested in products should attempt and aim to perfect. One day as a product designer, he/she would not need to put these down to paper but just quickly bring to mind.