One of the steps that was necessary in order to work through the telestration project was the creation of a Hierarchical Task Analysis. This was necessary after understanding the types of communication breakdowns that occurred within laparoscopic surgery. After watching recorded video of laparoscopic surgery, I then created a number of tasks based on the literature and observations. This was then validated through talking with laparoscopic surgeons and gaining their input. Multiple surgeons were consulted to make sure that not just one method for laparoscopic surgery was represented, and then the task analysis was revised until it was validated among multiple surgeons.

Two of the most important things that I learned were about user experience and communication. Given that I had next to no knowledge of laparoscopic surgery when I started, most of my terminology was woefully inadequate at the start. As a result, it was hard for the first surgeon I talked with to understand what I meant at several points of my document. The second lesson was a rather broad one on user experience: I learned from my mentor at this time that user experience methodologies and techniques that we learned about in class had to have a very clearly defined context before it could be properly applied. The segmented nature of this project (the Hierarchical Task Analysis as part of the larger telestration project) allowed me to effectively use qualitative methods as a metric for understanding the workflow without worrying about context of the larger project as a whole.