The Task Analysis Grid
December 21st, 2006
Few people are as full of surprises as Todd Warfel, who brings us this ingenious 3-foot wide communication tool:
One of the greatest challenges we face in the design field is communicating design decisions to other stakeholders (e.g. Business unit, Marketing, Engineering). We’re often forced to attempt this through a requirements document. Personally, I’ve yet to come across a requirements document that is usable and doesn’t take a couple of days to get everyone on the same page. So, we use something different - a task analysis grid.
Each column starts out with a scenario, describes a task and is followed by all the sub-tasks necessary to complete the task. The sub tasks are colour-coded and prioritized from 1 (must haves) to 4 (some day in the future).
December 21st, 2006 at 8:33 pm
Thank you for sharing this. I particularly like the first 4 rows and the comprehensive feel of having it on one page. Easier to all be on the same page, when it’s only one page.
December 25th, 2006 at 10:09 pm
Daniel,
The comprehensive nature of the Task Analysis Grid is what makes it works so well with clients. The most powerful thing it does it gets the team talking more about user behavior and less about specific requirements written in a 60 page requirement doc.
We typically develop the Grid during our research phase along with personas, so getting people to start talking/thinking about features at a behavioral level instead of specific technical requirements at that point makes sense. We don’t necessarily think this should be a replacement for a requirements document, but more of a precursor.
The one thing that I feel is missing is a rating of business need. The Grid does a good job of showing user need and value, but we have recently started adding a layer of business value to the mix, which seems to help show the bigger picture of importance based on both user need and value to the business.
July 8th, 2007 at 9:07 am
*The one thing that I feel is missing is a rating of business need.*
According to [these comments from Todd](http://www.info-arch.org/lists/sigia-l/0607/0105.html), the “rating of business need” is implied in the colour of the tasks:
*Those prioritizations come from discussions with the business unit and are framed around the Customer and Business needs. So, if it’s a 1, it’s because both
the customer and business unit think we have to have it.*