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- Would like to be able to embed images easily and meaningfully
- anchoring images to its position on the page, rather than letting them float or placing them inline with text
Task Analysis
There are three main tasks associated with solving our problem. They are as follows:
Writing Content
- Why is the task being done?## We want the user to be able to know what part of the paper he’s editing. For instance, MS word and TinyMCE are actually written in XML with some very complicated parsing to display what they see. We want the user to be able, intuitively, to be able to have different sections (headers, paragraphs) and be able to format these later easily (so all the paragraphs or headers can looks similar)
- What does the user need to know before doing the task?## The user should need to know nothing except what he wants to write. The interface should be intuitive enough that the sections will make sense without knowledge of how the backend actually works.
- Where is the task performed?## We would have some kind of backend in HTML (or something) that would have the different types of sections (paragraph, header, title) and therefore be able to format each type of section later on, so that layouts can be applied easily to the whole document.
- What is the environment like?## Ideally the environment would be like any other word processor, but easier to understand how to use the formatting tools at hand.
- How often is the task performed?## The task is performed whenever the user needs to create a new document of any kind (e.g. blog, paper, report, presentation).
- What are its time or resource constraints?## The resource constraints are whatever the user needs to input, and the time constraints are whatever deadline the user has.
- How is the task learned?## The task is learned by having the sections displayed very obviously when inputting content. We could have different boxes the user might want to type into show up (navigable by shortcuts or tabs, for advanced users) with some kind of nesting structure being provided by indents or boldness of outline (if nesting is relevant to the section involved)
- What can go wrong?## It might become something as hard to understand as TinyMCE or Word’s input process if we don’t make the different sections intuitive enough.
- Who else is involved in the task?## Only the user should be involved with the task (unless the audience is considered, but that shouldn’t be part of inputting the content)