How do you decide when to use task analysis or process analysis in technical writing?

A hierarchical task-analysis diagram is a good tool to define and showcase a task analysis. It helps clarify the sub tasks and steps that takes to complete the task at hand.

Workflow Documentation: When documenting complex processes, I created flowcharts or diagrams to visualize the entire workflow. For instance, in documenting a business process, I would outline each stage and how tasks interrelate, highlighting dependencies and interactions. Process Improvement: This comprehensive approach provided insights into how processes could be streamlined or improved. Method to Gain Insights: Process Mapping: Use tools like flowcharts or process maps to visualize and analyze workflows. This helps in understanding the overall process and identifying areas for improvement. Stakeholder Interviews: Engage with stakeholders or team members to gain insights into the process’s effectiveness and areas needing improvement.

Process analysis provides critical context for tasks. It gives meaningful details for all the ‘why’ of your tasks. While the task analysis is largely about ‘how’ the task is done to move a process forward. Generally, stakeholders/leadership are more interested in process while users/doers are more interested in task. However, it is important that both groups get some visibility to both. When stakeholders don’t understand the complexity of a designed task, they may find that their teams are overburdened with needlessly complex or redundant steps. When users don’t understand the context of their tasks, they are ill informed to make good decisions about the natural ‘modifications’ that teams make to tasks.

Decide between task analysis and process analysis based on the content's purpose. Use task analysis for step-by-step guides on specific actions users need to perform. Choose process analysis for explaining broader workflows or sequences of events. Select the method that best helps your audience understand and complete their objectives.

In our business, which is mostly focused on creating customer-facing documentation, we like to say that we translate "engineerish" into "enduserese". We usually compile large amounts of material created by engineers (maybe we could call it process-analys-ed?) and we break it down into meaningful tasks for the end user. Engineers tend to write for other engineers, and they spend a lot of ink explaining how something works when most of our clients want to know how to use it. Of course, as TWs we can be asked to create content output that will be more global, but to us, it is rare. In the end, it all boils down to TW's basic of the basics: know thy audience.

Depending on the product, product maturity, and task being described, the user might need some context. This can be a line or more. The goal is to introduce the use case or use cases with the minimum conceptual content. The user is ready to learn the task, do not lead them away to other topics. Retain and empower them in few words before they step into the procedural portion of the task. Takeaway: - Design your procedural topic to include some context for the tasks. - Keep the introduction short or provide easy to use links in the topic.