Hierarchical Task Analysis tells you what users do and in what order. Cognitive Task Analysis (CTA) asks a harder question: what is going on in the user's head while they do it? CTA methods surface the knowledge, cues, judgments, and decisions that experts rely on but rarely state out loud — the things that never appear in a procedure manual yet determine whether a task succeeds or fails.
In this topic you will look at what CTA adds beyond HTA, the core techniques used to elicit expert knowledge (structured and probing interviews, critical decision method, think-aloud protocols, concept mapping), how to locate decision points and reconstruct users' mental models, and how to represent findings in forms a design team can act on — decision requirement tables, concept maps, annotated task flows. The payoff comes in the last subtopic: turning those findings into concrete interface requirements, such as what information must be visible at a decision point, what should be defaulted, and where the interface should prevent a predictable error.
The videos below do not teach CTA procedures directly; they build the two skills CTA depends on. The first two are about questioning technique — how to probe beliefs, reasoning, and assumptions without leading the person you are interviewing, which is exactly the skill a CTA interview requires. The third is about cognitive bias, which matters both because users' mental models are shaped by biases you will have to design around, and because your own biases can distort what you hear in an interview. As you watch, keep translating: when you hear a question type, ask yourself what it would reveal about a user's decision at a step in a workflow you are analyzing.
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.