Interactive System Design: Understanding Users in Context

Is computer system design primarily concerned with pushing forward the technological frontiers, or with enhancing quality of life and productivity? What are the qualities that we seek in design? The starting point for this lecture is that design should yield systems that are usable, useful and interesting. The question is: how do we achieve systems with such qualities? The challenge of designing and implementing systems grows greater by the year. The technical possibilities are expanding rapidly, from traditional desktop machines through networked computers to nomadic and ubiquitous computing. Despite the rapid technical developments, the users of those systems ‐ arguably the very reason for their existence ‐ are evolving slowly, if at all. The environments within which they work, and their motivations and tasks, change gradually in response to new possibilities. Engineering effective interactive systems demands an appropriately expressed understanding of the properties of users, interactions and contexts of use. In this lecture, we will explore some approaches to representing essential components of interactive systems in context, and how those representations can be used to guide the design and evaluation of systems. We will consider a variety of systems ‐ from safety critical and distributed systems to personal electronic aids.