Task-Oriented vs. Feature-Oriented Design

Features are like a garage full of tools. Yes, you can do just about anything with a garage full of tools, but it takes a lot of skill and knowledge to know which tools to use at which step of a process. How do you avoid the problem of relying on the highly variable levels of individual skill and knowledge of different users?

In my previous post about the ViabilityMatrix, I mentioned that you must perform a task-oriented research and design approach in order to identify the tasks included in the matrix. Many people raised questions about the differences between feature-oriented vs. task-oriented design, so I wrote a quick blog post about it on my website. Focusing on tasks rather than features is a much more successful approach and promotes a best practice flow that helps users succeed beyond their highly variable levels of skill and knowledge. Read the blog post here...