These methods vary greatly in the attention paid to the users tasks.
Some methods require detailed task descriptions while others are task-independent.
Unfortunately, collecting detailed task information can be difficult. On the other hand, task-independent methods cannot evaluate a design for the tasks users actually perform. The goal of this research is to develop a metric, which incorporates simple task descriptions, that can assist designers in organizing widgets in the user interface. Simple task descriptions provide some of the benefits, without the difficulties, of performing a detailed task analysis. This task description can either be from observations of an existing system or from a simplified task analysis.