Task models in the context of user interface development

Abstract

Task models are widely used in the field of user interface development. They represent a human actor's performance or the co-operation of a group of people on or together with a system. For considerable time, it was an open problem in the field how to switch from the analyzing step of task analysis and modeling to the synthesizing step of user interface design. In the meantime, interesting approaches have shown up dealing with this problem and helping to bridge the gap between task modeling and user interface development. In this chapter, some of these approaches are discussed, together with recent concepts used to improve the usability of user interfaces based upon underlying task models. © 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.