Task Analysis

For my graduate classes at the University of North Dakota, I created, developed, and user tested a course. The topic is how to do a yoga handstand at home, drawing from my years of studio practice and recent success with this challenging pose in my home practice. The constriction and isolation of the pandemic gave me the final motivation to summit the pose.

One of the early steps in developing the course was performing a task analysis: determining the identity and order of skills to be developed to meet the goal. This included identifying the prerequisite skills to be drawn on. This chart shows the results of the task analysis. The skills below the dotted line are prerequisites. All of the skills above the dotted line are covered in the course, and increase in complexity moving upwards.

This task analysis shows the results of the ideation phase of design thinking. I first came up with all the skills and possible poses to prepare for the goal pose. Then, I refined that list to eliminate duplication and narrow it down to just the necessary poses.