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Lect02 Pact Analysis

The document discusses the PACT framework for designing interactive systems, which focuses on considering how People, their Activities, and the Contexts they engage in interact with and shape the Technologies that are designed. It emphasizes taking a human-centered approach to understand user needs and contexts of use in order to develop technologies that are usable, useful, and enjoyable. The PACT framework is presented as a holistic way to analyze interactive systems design challenges from multiple perspectives.

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Ritwan Alrashit
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61 views

Lect02 Pact Analysis

The document discusses the PACT framework for designing interactive systems, which focuses on considering how People, their Activities, and the Contexts they engage in interact with and shape the Technologies that are designed. It emphasizes taking a human-centered approach to understand user needs and contexts of use in order to develop technologies that are usable, useful, and enjoyable. The PACT framework is presented as a holistic way to analyze interactive systems design challenges from multiple perspectives.

Uploaded by

Ritwan Alrashit
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
Available Formats
Download as PPT, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Chapter 2

PACT

Rift Valley University


2022/2023

1
Designing Interactive Systems

--A fusion of skills


PACT Framework
-People, Activities, Contexts,
Technologies
Why usability?“
A central concern of interaction design is to develop interactive
products that are usable. By this is generally meant:
easy to learn,

effective to use,

and providing an enjoyable user experience.

”A good place to start thinking about how to design usable


interactive products is to compare examples of well-and poorly-
designed ones. Through identifying the specific weaknesses
and strengths of different interactive systems, we can begin to
understand what it means for something to be usable or not.”
We are Interactive Systems
Designers…

 What is our goal?


 to design interactive systems that are
enjoyable to use, that do useful things and
that enhance the lives of the people that use
them.
 We want our interactive systems to be
accessible, usable and engaging.
 How to Achieve this?
 Using human-centred approach.
In the past…

Unfortunately, the design of


computer systems and
products in the past has not
always had a good record of
considering the people who
use them…..
….Now
 In the days of the Web, issues of
usability are critical to e-commerce.
 Before the immediacy of e-commerce,
usability problems were only
discovered after purchase.
 On the Web, customers look at usability
first!
 People are becoming more critical about
the design of products and systems
What are Interactive systems?
 They are components, devices, products
and software systems concerned with
processing information.
 They deal with the transmission, display,
storage or transformation of information
that people can perceive and that respond
to people’s actions
 That includes such things as phones, web
sites and washing machine controllers
So what is interactive systems
design about?

 Design – What is design and how to do it?


 Technologies – the interactive systems,
products, devices and components themselves
 People - who will use it, who will be affected by
it?
 Activities and contexts - what will people have to
do in what circumstances?
People and technologies….
People are Machines are
The machine- Vague Precise
centred view

Disorganized Orderly
Distractible Undistractible
Emotional Unemotional
Illogical Logical
…. are different!
People are Machines are

The people- Creative Dumb


centred view

Compliant Rigid
Attentive to Insensitive to
change change
Resourceful Unimaginative
Able to make Constrained to
flexible decisions make consistent
based on context decisions
The User Interface
 All those parts of the system we come into
contact with…
 Physically we might interact with a device by
pressing buttons or moving levers and the
interactive device might respond by providing
feedback through the pressure of the button or
lever.
 Perceptually the device displays things on a
screen, or makes noises which we can see and
hear.
 Conceptually we interact with a device by trying
to work out what it does and what we should be
doing. The device provides messages and other
displays which are designed to help us do this.
What are the user interfaces here?

Figure 1.6 Various user interfaces.


Sources: Horstmann Controls Ltd; Hewlett-Packard Ltd.
The user interface
 Input
 some methods are needed to enter commands (tell the
system what we want it to do)
 We also need to be able to navigate through the
commands and the content of the system
 We need to enter data or other content into the
system
 Output
 So the system can tell us what is happening - provide
feedback
 So the system can display the content to us.
Designing interactive systems
 …. is more than just designing the user
interface …. is more than designing the
input, output and content
 It is about designing the whole human-
computer interaction
 It is about designing the human-human
interaction that is often enabled through
devices
 It is about designing whole environments of
interlinked devices and objects
Being Human-Centred
 We take a human-centred approach
to designing interactive systems.
That means…
 thinking about what people want to do
rather than just what the technology can
do
 designing new ways to connect people
with people
 involving people in the design process
 designing for diversity
Where are we heading?..

What will the future be?....


Artificial Intelligence and Virtual Reality
The Skills of the Interactive Systems Designer
Knowing about people
 Sociology, anthropology, psychology, culture
Knowing about technologies
 Software, communications, materials, databases, etc.
Knowing about activities and contexts
 Communities of practice, information systems,
organizations, knowledge management
Knowing about design
 Information design, architecture, product design
Disciplines contributing to interactive systems design
Why being human-centred is important?

Safety

Effectiveness

Ethics
PACT Framework
 People undertake activities, in
contexts using technologies.

 It is the variety in each of the PACT


elements - and their combination - that
makes interactive systems design so
fascinating and challenging.
Activities and Technologies

Source: after Carroll (2002), Figure 3.1, p. 68.


Activities and technologies
 Activities (and the contexts in which they
occur) establish requirements for
technologies
 Technologies offer opportunities to
undertake activities in different ways
 Designers try to design technologies
within some domain (a ‘sphere of activity’)
to meet people’s requirements
 …. In designing some technology, they
change people’s activities.
PACT

 People
 Activities

 Contexts

 Technologies
People are different from one another

 Physical differences
 Height, weight, different capabilities in sight,
hearing, touch,…
 Psychological differences
 Different ways of working; different memory
abilities, spatial ability; different amounts of
attention at different times; ability to recognize
things or remember things. Different ‘mental
models’
 Usage differences
 Experts versus novices, discretionary users of
technologies, differences in designing for a
heterogeneous group or a homogeneous group
Characteristics of different activities

 Temporal aspects
 To do with timing, frequency etc.
 Co-operation
 Working with others or not?
 Complexity
 Are they well-defined or vague?
 Safety critical
 What problems happen if something goes wrong?
 Content
 What information and media are we dealing with?
Different contexts of use

 Activities always take place in some context


 ‘Context’ sometimes means things that surround an
activity and sometimes what glues an activity
together.

Three types of context:

 Physical environment
 ATM or ticket machine versus computer at home
 Social context
 Help from others, acceptability of certain designs
 Organizational context
 Power structure, changes in life style, de-skilling,
etc.
Different technologies

 Input
 How to enter data and commands into the system.
Suitability of medium for different
contexts/activities
 Output
 Characteristics of displays - ‘streamy’ media
versus ‘chunky’ media. Characteristics of the
content. Also feedback is important
 Communication
 Between person and technology. Bandwidth,
speed. communication between devices
 Content
 Functional systems versus systems more focused
on content
Doing a PACT analysis
 How to identify the range of PACT elements in a domain?
 Brainstorming
 A group of you get together and talk through ideas and
possibilities
 Do not dismiss ideas at first - anything goes! Do not put other
people’s ideas down
 After you have a set of possibilities go through and weed out
the more ridiculous ones
 Envisioning ideas
 Draw pictures, sketches, cartoons, cut out pictures from
magazines and stick them on a board, etc.
 Work with relevant people
 Workshops, interviews, observations
 Write up as scenarios
Challenge..
 Can you do a PACT analysis for
the system that you want to
develop?

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