UMLUse Case DiagramsThe Importance of Goals in Task Modeling

In capturing the goal associated with a task, the usability professional is taking a step towards understanding the motivation the user—or organization—has in setting out to complete the task. In the case of users this is critically important to understanding how a user is likely to go about completing a task. The goal defines the primary force drawing the user to change the state of the world in some desirable way.

One very important reason for the usability professional to model organizational context has to do with goals. Since a process is ultimately composed of user responsibilities there are two complementary but very different ways to look at process decomposition. One way is the traditional decomposition of work—that is, the task activity that must be completed to complete the process. But, at the same time, a process is also a decomposition of goals. While the organization may have one goal in establishing a process, the members of that organization may have conflicting goals for the user responsibilities that make up that process. If this is the case, it is possible for all of the requisite user responsibilities to be completed without satisfying the goal of the organization and its process!