Reinventing the Wheel: Control Task Analysis for Collaboration

Abstract

Cognitive work analysis (CWA) is a relatively new human factors perspective for analyzing complex sociotechnical systems. However, it does not yet have specific tools and techniques that allow it to address teamwork explicitly enough to provide good guidance on how to support teams and collaboration. In this paper, Decision Wheels are introduced as an extension to the Decision Ladders for representing collaboration in teamwork environments. This extension would be a significant contribution to both CWA methodology and human factors methods for team situations. It would enable human factors practitioners to understand the cognitive work of teams better, and to design better collaborative systems for teamwork environments.