The Research On HTA Application And Development Of HTA Multi-modal Tool

HTA(Hierarchical Task Analysis)is a core technique of HCI,and is "used in almost every circumstance"and the "best known" task analysis technique,and is a method to describe the hierarchical system of the goal and its sub-goal,and is often used to analyse the goals of human beings or the tasks of the machine systems,and has been widely researched and used for about 40 years.This paper focuses on the application of the HTA and the HTA computer-aided tool as follow:Firstly,the paper summarizes and briefly introduces the HTA method and the status of the research on its applications,and also analyses the user groups of the HTA computer-aided tool and the necessity of the HTA Multi-modal tool.Secondly,the paper studies the HTA application in UI usability evaluation field.Based on the current status of this field,for low-fidelity prototypes and some systems which can not be evaluated by the formal user testing and user satisfaction evaluation,the paper gives an HTA-based UI usability evaluation method:HUGE, and validates the HUGE by the practice with an example of the post package bill filling system.This practice indicates the feasibility and the validity of the HUGE to a certain extent.In the practice,the paper updates the existing UI of the post package bill filling system,and the new UI provides better usability after evaluations.Because that the HUGE scales the user satisfaction and effectiveness based on the HTA hierarchical output,this practice indirectly indicates that HTA is useful to a certian extent in the effectiveness and user satisfaction related usability evaluations.Lastly,based on the research of the HTA method,with the analysis of the HTA computer-aided tool,the paper designs the HTA Multi-modal tool prototype UI with the paper-based metaphor and the desk-based metaphor,and implements the HTA Multi-modal tool prototype which expands the human-machine(HTA analyzers and computers)interaction bandwidth by finishing the HTA hierarchical outputs with the pen and voice input and the familiar command gestures of human beings,and enhances the human-human(HTA analyzers and people analysed)information exchange bandwidth by the network remote communications.The HTA Multi-modal tool prototype supports the HTA method,but the HUGE method is the application based on the HTA method,so this prototype also supports to make the HTA. hierarchical outputs of the HUGE method.