You need to compare a student's behavior when locating admission requirements of a university. (i) A complete hierarchical task analysis (HTA) for locating admission requirements of graduate studies at New York University for the English department is required. (ii) A complete HTA for locating admission requirements for graduate studies at Harvard for the English Department is required. Discuss whether the solutions to (i) and (ii) can be modified to emphasize their common features and whether this would clarify the overall task description. P.S: This is Human Computer Interaction Topic, there are no more references to it. For the book you can refer: https://paragnachaliya.in/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/HCI_Alan_Dix.pdf, Chapter 15.

 You need to compare a student's behavior when locating admission requirements of a university.

(i) A complete hierarchical task analysis (HTA) for locating admission requirements of graduate studies at New York University for the English department is required.
(ii) A complete HTA for locating admission requirements for graduate studies at Harvard for the English Department is required.
Discuss whether the solutions to (i) and (ii) can be modified to emphasize their common features and whether this would clarify the overall task description.

P.S: This is Human Computer Interaction Topic, there are no more references to it.
For the book you can refer: https://paragnachaliya.in/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/HCI_Alan_Dix.pdf, Chapter 15.

Ans:One of the standard ways of presenting a HTA is as a tree structure: There may be some other notations you are familiar with where the order of appearance of boxes in the tree indicates ordering (probably left to right). This is not the case for HTA: the only thing that matters is the hierarchy. As well as presenting the hierarchy, it is necessary to describe plans that define the possible ordering of activities. In this case, a suitable plan would be: Plan 0: Do 1, then 2 and 3 in either order, then 4. Although tree structures are visually appealing – well, more appealing than the alternatives, anyway – they can be tedious to draw without a suitable tool. Therefore an alternative text-based notation that relies on indentation is often used. We will use this textual notation to expand the task description for the letter-writing task. 0: Write letter and prepare for posting 1: Prepare for writing 1.1: Get paper 1.2: Get envelope 1.3: Get pen 1.4: Get address book (not explicitly stated, but clearly necessary) 2: Write letter 2.1: Write own address 2.2: Write addressee's address 2.3: Write date and "Dear..." 2.4: Write body text of letter 2.5: Sign off 3: Prepare envelope 3.1: Write name on envelope 3.2: Write address on envelope 4: Put letter in envelope 4.1: Fold letter 4.2: Place letter into envelope 4.3: Seal envelope Again, we need plans to describe how to perform each subtask: Plan 1: Do 1.1, 1.2, 1.3 and 1.4 in any order Plan 2: Do 2.1 then 2.2 then 2.3 then 2.4 then 2.5 Plan 3: Do 3.1 then 3.2 Plan 4: Do 4.1 then 4.2 then 4.3. Task analysis involves generating as general a description as possible. So, for example, we might want to generalise tasks 2.1, 2.2 and 2.3 to a new task: write head of letter. Similarly, we might notice that it is not necessary to have the envelope to hand until the time when it is to be prepare, or the paper to hand until the point where the user starts writing the letter, but we need the pen and address book for both, so we might break down task 1. If we do these things, we get a new structure: 0: Write letter and prepare for posting 1: Get paper 2: Get envelope 3: Prepare for writing 3.1: Get pen 3.2: Get address book 4: Write letter 4.1: Write head of letter 4.1.1: Write own address 4.1.2: Write addressee’s address 4.1.3: Write date and “Dear…” 4.2: Write body text of letter 4.3: Sign off 5: Prepare envelope 6: Put letter in envelope Again, we need plans to describe how to perform each subtask: Plan 0: Do 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5, then 6. 3 must be done before 4 and 5; 1 must be done before 4; 2 must be done before 5. Plan 3: Do 3.1 and 3.2 in either order Plan 4: Do 4.1 then 4.2 then 4.3. Plan 4.1: Do 4.1.1 then 4.1.2 then 4.1.3 Plan 5: Do 5.1 then 5.2 Plan 6: Do 6.1 then 6.2 then 6.3. We see that now different parts of the task analysis are presented at different levels of detail. This is often thought of as a Bad Thing, but in this case it allows us to describe the optionally and alternative orderings within the task more clearly. As with most aspects of design, there is no perfect solution just solutions that are better or worse for particular purposes.