Refining the Task Design

At this point, the usability analyst is ready to work with the application developer, who is familiar with the Expense Report business object and the underlying data model for the objects. Together, they sketch the view layouts on a whiteboard. The application developer identifies the business components and applets that the Submit expense report and the Review expense report tasks require.

The team must determine whether the user must create all expense items in the same view, or create each item in a separate view. The business analysis indicates that most users do this job task frequently. The business analyst and the usability analyst agree that productivity is more important than UI simplicity, and they conclude that the user must create all items in the same view. As an advantage of this hierarchical technique, the usability analyst realizes the possibility of reuse for two applets in two similar views. The third view that resides in the submission task displays the same data as the view that resides in the review task displays.