Task Patterns for Taking Into Account in an Efficient and Systematic Way Both Standard and Erroneous User Behaviours

Abstract

While designing interactive software, the use of a formal specification technique is of great help because it provides non-ambiguous, complete and concise notations. The advantages of using such a formalism is widened if it is provided by formal analysis techniques that allow to prove properties about the design, thus giving an early verification to the designer before the application is actually implemented. However, formal specification of interactive systems (even though aiming to produce reliable software) often does not address the issues of erroneous user behaviour. This paper tackles the problem by proposing a systematic way of dealing with erroneous user behaviour. We propose to extend task models (describing standard user behaviour) with erroneous user behaviour. Without appropriate support, incorporating erroneous user behaviour in task models requires much effort from task analysts. We thus propose the definition of patterns of user errors in task models. These patterns of errors are then systematically applied to a task model in order to build a task model covering both standard and erroneous user behaviour. These task models can then be exploited towards system models to provide a systematic way of assessing both system compliance to user tasks and system tolerance to user errors.

Understanding Functional Resonance through a Federation of Models: Preliminary Findings of an Avionics Case Study

“…Lastly, variability and resonance can also occur through system failure occurs or operators errors. We aim at integrating previous work we have done in the area of systems reconfiguration [16] and systematic account for human error using task models [17] to address variability for all the components of the socio-technical system.…”

Gulfs of expectation: eliciting and verifying differences in trust expectations using personas

“…However, despite work on adapting task modelling techniques to support the engineering of interactive systems, e.g. [17][18][19][20], they can be problematic when considering their design for two reasons.…”

Enhanced Task Modelling for Systematic Identification and Explicit Representation of Human Errors

“…GEMS is very detailed in terms of description and vocabulary (e.g. strong habit intrusion, capture errors, overshooting a stop rule …) and structuring approaches have been proposed as the Human Error Reference Table (HERT) in [25].…”

“…This approach is relevant for human error identification but only in generic terms (as it exploits HAZOP which is a standard hazard analysis method). Palanque and Basnyat proposed a technique based on task patterns (represented in CTT) that supports human routine errors [25] description. Here a specific task model is produced in which recovery actions following errors are explicitly represented, thus ending up with two un-connected task model.…”

“…GEMS is very detailed in terms of description and vocabulary (e.g. strong habit intrusion, capture errors, overshooting a stop rule …) and structuring approaches have been proposed as the Human Error Reference Table (HERT) in [25].Causes of errors and their observation are different concepts that should be separated when analyzing user errors. To do so, Hollnagel [9] proposed a terminology based on 2 main concepts: phenotype and genotype.…”