Making use is more than a matter of task analysis
John M. Carroll · Interacting with Computers · 2002
I am pleased and honored that such an impressive group of commentators considered my book Making Use(Carroll, 2000) worthy of discussion and analysis. I would not expect, nor even prefer really, to have everyone agree with me. What would bother me, what would bother any author, is to not be read at all. Dan Diaper's critical review and the commentaries by David Benyon/Catriona Macaulay, Tom Carey, and Fabio Paternò, will help to make that less likely! Many important themes are raised in Diaper (2002) review and in the commentaries. In this response I want to concentrate on refining a few of the main issues and distinctions. First, I briefly consider contrasts in values. I think that preferences for scenario-based design versus traditional task analytic methods reflect differences in the underlying world views and values of designers and researchers. To some extent, therefore, the issues in this discussion are not just technical, but paradigmatic and moral. Second, I consider the state of design practices in HCI and its implications for where onus lies in contemporary methodological argumentation and for what sorts of data are pertinent and required to address outstanding methodological issues. Finally, I consider the question of how task analysis, in the sense of structured task decomposition, might be reconstructed in the emerging paradigm of scenario-based design.