From Task to Activity

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From Task to Activity

• A Case Study of Developing for Innovation

Nancy Kaplan School of Information Arts and
Technologies University of Baltimore
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UCD Considered Harmful

• Edsger Djikstra
• Go To Statement Considered Harmful, Letter to
  the Communications of the ACM, 1968
• Part of an effort to develop formal verification
  for programs, structured programming movement
• Now in the ACMs hall of fame

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Normans Beef

• Wants to provoke reconsideration of HCD
  fundamentals (as in standard user and task
  analysis methods)
• Activities are larger than tasks
• Users are various and form moving targets
• These methods cant lead to innovation

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So Whats ACD?

• 3 Varieties Situated Action, Distributed
  Cognition, and Activity Theory
• Provide alternatives to traditional cognitive
  science and information processing models of the
  human beings role in relation to computers or
  other technical systems
• Focus on context (whatever that is)

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A Brief History of ACD

• From Human Factors to Human Actors, Liam
  Bannon, 1991
• Within the HF approach, the human is often
  reduced to being another system component with
  certain characteristics, such as limited
  attention span, faulty memory, etc., that need to
  be factored into the overall human-machine
  system.

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A Brief History of ACDBannon, cont.

• This form of piecemeal analysis of the persona
  as a set of components de-emphasizes important
  issues. Individual motivation, membership in a
  community of workers, and the importance of
  setting in determining human action are just a
  few of the issues that are neglected in the HF
  approach.

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Three Questions

• Whats the difference between UCD and ACD?
• Does the difference make a difference?
• If so, how can we put ACD into practice?

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Bannons Conclusions
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Differences

• Lab experiments v. observation in real settings
• See A. Dillon Designing Usable Electronic
  Text for an overview of research on reading from
  screens
• Errors and inefficiencies v. whole user
  experience
• Initial steps of usage v. actual, long-term use
• Human actions v. human activities

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Activity Theory in a Nutshell

• Beyond actions gt rich context
• Activities key units of analysis
• Actions occur only in contexts and without their
  contexts actions in themselves are impossible to
  understand.
• See Kuutti, K., A Framework for HCI
  Research in Nardi, B. (ed), Context and
  Consciousness, MIT Press, 1996.

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Activity Theory in a Nutshell

• Activities undergo continuous change and
  development they are contingent and emergent,
  not fully planned
• Activities always contain artifacts
• Examples of artifacts instruments, signs,
  procedures, machines, methods, laws, forms of
  work organization
• Activities are composed of subjects (actors),
  objects (motives or goals), actions (tasks), and
  operations (methods and selection rules in GOMS
  terms)

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Do the differences matter?UCD Reading

• Reading as task
• Locate desired text (search bookshelves)
• Display it (pick it up)
• Decipher it (make sense of letters, words,
  sentences)
• Navigate it (turn pages)

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Do the differences matter? ACD Reading

• Reading as activity
• Define the object of reading pleasure,
  enrichment, knowledge
• Find text in the context of the readers object
• Undertake necessary actions (display, navigate,
  decode, make sense) in a sanctioned or preferred
  setting
• Participate in the community of readers, knowers

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Exploring implications with case studies

• Look at three interfaces for reading books online
• Examine the findings from contextual inquiry and
  compare to the findings from participatory and
  iterative design
• Look at results of use in the wild

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Contextual Inquiry Informants UCD for Reading

• Kids reading as a leisure activity do it at home,
  mostly, often in their bedrooms, often in bed
• If they talk about books, they do it with parents
  not peers
• They know they are not allowed to make marks in
  books

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Participatory Design Partners ACD for Reading

• Kids envision dynamic books searchable,
  supporting link lists, providing sounds
• Kids explore leaving marks in books and sharing
  with friends
• Kids explore interfaces to represent the presence
  of other readers within the book display

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Interfaces for Reading What the Book Should Look
Like and Do
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Reading in the Wild Two Case Studies

• Designing for the activity of reading leads to
  innovation
• The novel situation of reading changes reading
  practices

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Reading in the WildPart One

• Design partners and their parents read a book
  with Alph
• WARNING Tiny n!16 participants (7 youngsters
  and 9 adults) divided into 6 Internet Reading
  Groups
• Kids as designers much better with the system
  than their parents
• We see the first signs of sociable literacy

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Reading in the Wild Part Two

• Volunteers solicited by the Corvallis
  Benton-County Public Library
• Tiny n, zero gender balance, small age range!
• Using Alph, participants read a book, chosen by
  the childrens librarian, for 4 weeks
• We gather data from the systems logs and from
  discussion with participants

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A Close-up Reading with Alph
Amethysts activities during one reading session
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Coming Back to Earth

• Ok, so ACD works in practice, but will it work in
  theory?
• A new framework for what were doing?
• A new marriage of town and gown?
• How can we apply ACD in the real world and for
  what problems is it appropriate?