This article describes the design of a prototype multiauthor multimedia document production (MAMMDP) system. In particular, the article concentrates on how the system's tasks were analyzed and represented during the early stages of the design. The aim of the article 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. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

The work reported here attempts to address Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) design problems by the creation of support for the conceptualization of such problems during evaluation. This support takes the form of a planning aid intended to aid novice human factors practitioners(recently qualified graduates, for example) to evaluate interactive work systems. The planning aidprovides a structure for relating and recruiting techniques used in Human Factors (HF) evaluations. It incorporates relevant information for planning an evaluation (e.g., evaluation methods themselves), and offers advice in the form of heuristics about the use of the methods, their selection, and configuration. The output of the planning aid is an evaluation plan.This paper reports the development of the planning aid, and illustrates its application with a case study. Two assessments of the planning aid with novice HF practitioners are also presented and discussed.

Which behaviours of an interactive work system perform the work that the system was designed to do? And what do the other behaviours do? The idea of distinguishing work tasks and enabling tasks is presented. Suggestions are made on how to distinguish them, based on a conception for human-computer interaction. Suggestions are also made as to how the ideas may be useful in the design of interactive work systems. The ideas are illustrated by the analysis of some actual user-computer interactions in the domain of text editing.

Unless it is possible to use a broadband communications terminal for directly engaging in the tasks and activities which are important to the user (without the necessity of learning complex skills like those required to operate today's workstations) uptake will be restricted and usage will be inefficient. The enabling states approach, which distinguishes between the users' goal tasks, the states of the communication system which enable the performance of those tasks, and the enabling tasks required to create such enabling states, is described. The intention is to improve usability (and hence both uptake and usage) by designing interfaces that automatically identify and create the appropriate enabling states, allowing the user to concentrate on goal tasks rather than the enabling tasks. The approach is illustrated and discussed in the context of integrated broadband communication systems.>