A Case Study in Task Analysis for the Design of a Collaborative Document Production System

Abstract

Collaborative writing of paper-based documents is a complex activity that is currently poorly supported by interactive computer systems (Sharples et al., this volume). Multimedia documents are complex entities whose storage and presentation in computers has only recently become a tractable research and development problem (Alty 1991). Almost inevitably, therefore, interactive computer systems to support the collaborative production of multimedia documents are complex systems with which we have very little experience at the moment. This chapter describes the design of a prototype multi-author multimedia document production (MAMMDP) system. In particular, the chapter concentrates on how the system’s tasks were analysed and represented during the early stages of the design. The aim of the chapter is to relate our ideas and experiences from the analysis and design work, in the hope that some of them may prove useful to others concerned with MAMMDP. We believe that both the processes and the products of our analysis and design work can be informative about the development of MAMMDP systems.