Task analysis is the practice of breaking down what people actually do to accomplish a goal, step by step, before deciding what an interface should look like. Instead of starting with screens, buttons, or layouts, you start with the user's goal and the sequence of actions, decisions, and judgments that lead to it. Once that structure is clear, the interface can be organized to match it rather than forcing users to reorganize their work to match the software.
This topic sets up the vocabulary you will use for the rest of the module. A goal is the end state the user wants; a task is the work done to reach it; and tasks decompose into subtasks and operations. Some of those steps are observable (clicking, typing, scanning a label, picking up a document), while others are cognitive (recalling a value, comparing options, deciding whether an action moved them closer to the goal). Observable steps can be watched and timed; cognitive steps have to be inferred through questioning, think-aloud protocols, or structured inspection, which is why task analysis uses more than one method.
As you watch the videos below, focus on three things. First, notice how each one separates the user's goal from the mechanics of the path taken to reach it. Second, watch for where the invisible, in-the-head work shows up — the moments where a user has to know, remember, or decide something. Third, think about how each representation (a journey, a flow, a walkthrough question set, an interaction cycle) could be converted into a hierarchical breakdown of the kind you will build later in this module.
This short Nielsen Norman Group video contrasts two common ways of documenting a user's process: user journeys, which track a broader experience toward a goal, and user flows, which trace the specific step-by-step path through a system. Based on its title and description, it explains what each artifact captures, how they differ in scope and level of detail, and how teams use them together.
It directly supports the subtopics on user goals and on why task analysis informs interface structure, since both artifacts are goal-anchored decompositions of a process, and NN/g is a long-standing authority on UX method definitions.
A cognitive walkthrough is a task-based inspection method in which evaluators step through a task as a new user would and ask, at each step, whether the user would know what to do and whether they would recognize that their action worked. This video introduces the technique and its use in assessing how learnable a system is from a first-time user's perspective.
It is the clearest short treatment of observable versus cognitive steps, because the walkthrough questions make the hidden knowing-and-deciding work explicit at every action, and it previews the thinking behind cognitive task analysis.
This Interaction Design Foundation video presents the cycle of interaction between a person and a computer — forming an intention, carrying out actions, and then perceiving and interpreting the system's response. It frames human-computer interaction as a repeating loop rather than a single action, which is the conceptual basis for why tasks decompose into goals, actions, and evaluations.
It gives you the underlying model that makes task analysis coherent, connecting user goals to observable actions and to the cognitive interpretation that happens between them, from a well-established design education publisher.
Together these videos build the conceptual groundwork the module's outcomes depend on. The interaction cycle and the journey-versus-flow comparison give you the goal-to-step decomposition logic behind hierarchical task analysis and the structured diagrams you will produce (MO1, MO2), while the cognitive walkthrough video models how to surface the knowledge, recall, and decision steps that cognitive task analysis targets (MO1). All three train you to read a task sequence for points of confusion, missing feedback, or unnecessary detours — exactly the bottlenecks and design implications you will be asked to extract from your own task analysis results (MO3).
These videos were chosen from YouTube on October 3, 2026. Each has captions; the player turns them on. Videos on YouTube can be changed or removed — if one no longer plays, tell your instructor. If a player does not appear, use its Watch on YouTube link.