DECIDE-CTA: A designer-empowered method for creating structured cognitive task analyses from product instructions

Designers are required to perform human factors testing to demonstrate that their product is safe to use before it reaches the market, which includes identification of potential use errors. While this evaluation often focuses on physical tasks, many errors are driven by cognition. Cognitive Task Analysis (CTA) offers a structured method to expose the cognitive processes that shape physical actions, enabling deeper identification of tasks to evaluate. However, existing CTA methods were developed for cognitively trained experts, making them difficult for most design teams to apply. To improve accessibility, the underlying structure of existing CTA methods was combined with (a) embedding of discrete cognitive tasks within psychomotor information-processing sequences, (b) human-machine interaction principles, and (c) syntactic task guidance. This new framework empowers designers to incorporate cognitive depth into their product development considerations and risk assessments. The method, DECIDE-CTA (Designer-Empowered Cognitive Integration for Decomposition and Evaluation), was created by following the steps outlined below:•Develop a cognitive-psychomotor unified model, accessible to designers for CTA generation (Phases 1 and 2).•Create Task Categories linking designer knowledge to the cognitive-psychomotor unified model (Phase 3).•Create rule-based cognitive sentence syntaxes and CTA templates for describing the tasks and ordering the information within a CTA (Phase 4).