The development and testing of a semi-automated Hierarchical Task Analysis process

HTA has been described as one of the most popular and widely used Human Factors methods, partly owing to its flexibility and scope for further analysis that it offers (Stanton et al., 2013). HTA was developed in the 1960s to... [ view full abstract ]

HTA has been described as one of the most popular and widely used Human Factors methods, partly owing to its flexibility and scope for further analysis that it offers (Stanton et al., 2013). HTA was developed in the 1960s to understand the skills required in complex, non-repetitive operator tasks. The basic premise behind HTA is that tasks are explored through a hierarchy of goals indicating what a person is expected to do and plans indicate the conditions when subordinate goals should be carried out, which is akin to the decision making process of an operator. Each goal and the means of achieving them are represented as an operation. Due to its flexible nature HTA has seen many applications across a variety of domains, including interface design and evaluation, manual design, job description, training, allocation of function, job aid design, error prediction and analysis, team task analysis, workload assessment and procedure design (Stanton, 2006). However, one of the biggest limitations of the method is that it can be laborious and time consuming to conduct. Previous research sought to address this with the development of a HTA software tool. The software tool provided structure and expedited the documentation and presentation of the analysis results, allowing for quick edits to be made that propagated through to the rest of the analysis. However, this tool is still a desktop version of the pen and paper method and therefore requires a high proportion of manual input from a Human Factors analyst. As part of the EU funded i-VISION (Immersive Semantics-based Virtual Environments for the Design and Validation of Human-centred Aircraft Cockpits) project work has been undertaken to automate the HTA process in a virtual reality (VR) environment.