Usability for designers, P-A-C-T framework

Designing interactive applications using PACT framework

Creating user-centered applications to provide solutions has been challenging. As humans need and want to be changed by time. A technology cannot stay at one stage because it has to move with the humans. Designers should be able to understand the problems of the users who will use their applications. The designers should have a knowledge of the activities and the context in which the activities are were undertaken by the users. The designers should have the knowledge on how to approach a design problem and come up with better solutions to the problem in hand. The use of the PACT framework will allow the designers to create meaningful and effective designs.

People use technologies to take actions to react to their surroundings. From sending text messages to control the airline traffic humans use technology to make their life easy. These types of applications are being used by humans for various reasons. Since there is much reason for using the same application, the designing interactive application has become a challenging and interesting task. The technology, in general, helps users to undertake a wide range of activities in different environments. Technologies evolve with the activities in context.

How activities in the context improve the technologies and how technology can improve the activities in context

In the diagram, the activities in our surroundings and how we react to them makes the requirements for the new technologies. The new technologies make new opportunities that can change the nature of the activities that are being done in different situations. This cycle keeps continuing because people change their requirements and look for improvements in their lifestyle. The understanding of the cycle allows the designers to design effective solutions for a particular domain.

The PACT Framework

People — Activities — Context — Technology

The PACT model consists of People, Activities, Context, and Technology. The designers can inherit the variety of those four elements.

1. People: It’s a common knowledge that we humans are different to one another in many ways. There are some important factors that need to be considered.
   physical difference: Every human has different set of physical characteristics and the different senses such as hearing, touch, smell and sight. This has a huge effect on how usable, enjoyable and how accessible the product is going to be. There are many several disability types such as communication disorders, hearing impairments, visual impairments, motor impairments, impairments in mental functionality and learning. This kind of impairments has to be considered in the designs. Most of the designer’s design application for the perfect humans but as designers, we always forget that we should design for the people who have impairments that are unable to access the web as most of us do.
   Physiological difference: The physiological aspects of humans play a major role in application design. The people who have the ability to find information or the way to work with the application quickly can take an advantage of using the application from those who are not able to do the same. The designers should be keeping this point in mind and design applications for humans who do not have the ability to understand complex applications at a given reasonable time.
   Mental models: When humans work they always create a mental model on how the things should happen. They create a mental model by interacting with the system by observing the actions and behaviors of the application. It is really important for the designers to give enough information on the interface of the application for users to create a proper mental model when interacting with the application.
2. Activities: Humans conduct many activities that the designers have to keep in mind for. Some activities tend to be highly complex and some to be simple. First, the designer should understand what is the purpose of the activity and then the main features that would support the main activity such as
   Temporal aspects: It is to understand how frequently a task being carried out and how’s its frequency is.
   Co-operative or not: It is to have the awareness of others and understand what they are doing is important or not.
   Safety-critical: What problems happen if something goes wrong
   Content: What information and media are needed to do the activity.
   The idea is to understand how the current activities are carried out and why they are carried out and how a designer can improve the current design to a much more usable design.
3. Context : Activities happen in the context. Activities and context should be analyzed together. There are three main types of contexts to be distinguished.
   1. Social context: A supportive environment will give plenty of support to the user to carry out the tasks in hand. It can vary from using a product to traveling on a train. If the environment is more supportive people can complete the activity in the context more easily.
   2. Organizational context: It is important to understand the organizational context because the change of technology always impacts on power structure and communication. The need for new technology comes from the requirements of the humans when performing activities. It can be a very vast amount of the knowledge that the designer has to grab when designing for organizational context.
   3 Physical circumstances: This is one of the areas that the designers always tend to forget. When considering application design, the designer should always look into the physical environment which the action happens. If we take a common example of using an ATM machine, the ease of use of the ATM will depend on the physical environment. The ambient light, readability of the text, understanding of the language, use of accessibility features of the application all depends on the physical environment.
4. Technology : The technology will be a dependent on the business that the organization or a person is using. In this phase, the key idea is to gain knowledge on what technology being used now, what are the problems with it and how to improve the technology. The organization can be using a technology miracle to run the application but if the users don’t know how to work with it then it’s same as a brick. The inputs and outputs of the application should be clear to the user and should have a proper communication between the system and the user of the technology.

Using PACT framework will help the designers to understand the contexts from how a technology should be improved and which way in a general way. A key way to understand a user and their problem is to observe them while using the technology. Observing the users in the parts of this framework will give a distinct value and an advantage in creating a meaningful and usable application.