This topic takes the methods you learned earlier in the module — hierarchical task analysis (HTA) and cognitive task analysis (CTA) — and puts them to work inside your group design project. The practical questions here are different from the textbook ones: What is the single primary goal your users are trying to accomplish? Who on the team talks to users, and who writes up the notes? How do four people build one coherent task hierarchy instead of four partial ones? And how do interview findings about reasoning, judgment, and error become real content in your project document rather than an appendix nobody reads?
The work breaks into a sequence. First you narrow a broad project idea into a specific, researchable user goal. Then you divide data collection so that observation, interviews, and documentation review are covered without duplicated effort. Next you assemble the HTA as a team, agreeing on decomposition level and plans. Finally you fold CTA findings into the document and review it as a group for consistency, traceability, and clear design implications.
The three videos below come from Nielsen Norman Group, a long-standing UX research and consulting firm. None of them is specifically about HTA, so watch them for the surrounding project skills: how to sharpen a vague research goal into a specific one, how to decide what matters most when you cannot analyze everything, and how to reduce the administrative overhead that eats team time. As you watch, keep asking how each idea would change the way your team plans its next week of project work.
A short talk on turning broad, fuzzy research goals into specific, answerable ones, and on cultivating the mindset that keeps research focused. It is likely to show the difference between a vague aim and a goal that actually tells you what data to collect and from whom.
This maps directly onto the first subtopic, identifying your project's primary user goal: before any HTA can be drawn, the team has to agree on what goal is being decomposed. The source is Nielsen Norman Group, a credible and widely used authority on UX research practice.
An overview of prioritization methods used in UX work, built around the premise that you cannot include everything and that adding everything makes a product worse. Expect discussion of how teams weigh items against each other and decide what to pursue first.
Group projects run on limited time, so your team must choose which tasks to decompose in depth, which findings to foreground, and which to set aside — this video gives vocabulary and structured methods for making those calls defensibly.
A practical look at the administrative overhead of user research — scheduling, recruiting, consent, note handling — and ways to streamline or automate the repetitive parts. It focuses on process efficiency rather than on analysis technique.
It supports dividing data collection responsibilities by showing where coordination effort actually goes, helping your team assign roles and cut busywork so more time is left for building the HTA and writing up CTA findings.
These videos do not teach HTA or CTA notation directly; they support the project-execution side of the module outcomes. Making research goals specific (MO1, MO2) ensures the task you decompose is well defined enough to yield a meaningful hierarchy rather than an unfocused sketch. Prioritization methods (MO3) help the team move from a large set of observations to the bottlenecks and interface requirements worth reporting, while the research-overhead video protects the time your group needs to actually collect data, build the diagram, and review the final document together.
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.