Resources for Situated Actions

Abstract

Abstract. In recent years, advances in software tools have made it easier to analyze interactive system specifications, and the range of their possible behaviors. However, the effort involved in producing the specifications of the system is still substantial, and a difficulty exists regarding the specification of plausible behaviors on the part of the user. Recent trends in technology towards more mobile and distributed systems further exacerbates the issue, as contextual factors come in to play, and less structured, more opportunistic behavior on the part of the user makes purely task-based analysis difficult. In this paper we consider a resourced action approach to specification and analysis. In pursuing this approach we have two aims -firstly, to facilitate a resource-based analysis of user activity, allowing resources to be distributed across a number of artifacts, and secondly to consider within the analysis a wider range of plausible and opportunistic user behaviors without a heavy specification overhead, or requiring commitment to detailed user models.

Application of the Resources Model to the Supervision of an Automated Process

“…Many publications in the field of human-computer interaction (HCI) cite the resources model as an important reference for task-modeling tools (e.g., Blandford & Furniss, 2006;Doherty, Campos, & Harrison, 2008). For example, it can be applied to the design of virtual wayfinding environments (Smith & Hart, 2006), the modeling of smart environments (Harrison, Massink, & Latella, 2009), the design of graphic user interfaces (Mehrnejad, Toreini, & Ghaemi Bafghi, 2011), and the design of healthcare technology (Rajkomar & Blandford, 2011).…”

Situation Calculus for HCI Design

“…The effort required producing interactive system specifications, given the difficulty of predicting or obtaining a predefinied model of user behaviour, is immense [23]. The concerns that arise, from the foregoing discussion, revolve around the issues of complexity, adaptability, radical and rapid changes in requirements and the need for context sensitive design.…”

Representations for an iterative resource-based design approach

“…A resource-based design approach is described in [18,8,1] which is rooted in ideas related to the concept of 'situated action' [17] and Distributed Cognition [12]. Human activity is considered in this approach as a continuous interplay between external and internal artifacts.…”

“…In resourced-based design, as described in [1,8], formal models of information resources, activities and goals are developed. The explicit description of these user viewpoints supports the reflection of existing or envisaged interactive applications within various application contexts.…”

“…Interactive devices are specified at the level of supported user actions, and specifications are augmented with assumed information resources that are mapped to actions. A systematic checking of the resourcing of user actions with respect to different goals helps to identify potential usability problems (see, for example [1,8]). This paper argues for a tighter coupling between different design activities and moves away from an exclusive view based on formal analysis.…”