PACT Analysis

What Is A PACT Analysis?

1. People: relevant user characteristics and skills
2. Activities: how is the activity currently carried out? Why? What can be improved?
3. Context: the environment of the activity
4. Technologies: what tools are used now, and how might new developments be used?

People
1. Cognitive characteristics - level and duration of attention, perception, memory, learning
abilities, cognitive capabilities, fears, personality characteristics
2. Physical characteristics - age differences, physical abilities,
3. What motivates, pleases and engages - affect
4. experience & expectations - novice v's expert
5. language
6. Culture - For example, in Microsoft Excel there are two buttons, one labeled with a cross and
the other a tick. In the US a tick is used for acceptance and the cross rejection, but in Ireland
a tick or a cross can be used to show acceptance (e.g. a cross on a ballot paper).
7. special needs - blindness, colour blindness, deafness, wheel chair user
8. Homogenous vs heterogeneous user groups - website site users are (normally) heterogeneous
- many different types of people; users of a company's intranet are (generally) homogenous
9. Discretionary vs committed users - does the user have a choice? if yes, then you need to
encourage them to return
10. Infrequent vs frequent users - if users are normally infrequent, then interface must be
particularly 'helpful' as users will forget how to complete complicated tasks.

Activities
1. Goals, tasks and actions
2. Regular or unusual, weekly? Yearly? - frequent tasks should be easy to do; infrequent tasks
should be easy to learn or remember
3. Well-defined or vague
4. Continuous or interrupted - user may need to 'find their place' again
5. Current task practices
6. Individual vs co-operative work
7. Multi-tasking vs serial tasks
8. Passive vs active,
9. Quality vs quantity trade-off
10. Data input requirements
11. Length of time on tasks - peaks and troughs of working, need for fast response
12. Coping with errors - presentation of error messages, how to deal with them, how the system
accommodates them, significance of errors, safety critical errors

Context
1. Physical environments - noisy, cold, wet, dirty, stressful, uses dangerous materials, sunny
2. Social environments - channels of communication, structure,centralisation vs decentralisation,
home, mobile, training materials
3. Organisational context - relationships with customers, other staff, effect on work practices and
job content, role, deskilling, job loss, shift in power
4. Circumstances under which activities happen (time, place, pressure of work/time)
5. Amount and type of support for activities - tuition, manuals, demonstrations, new knowledge,
new skills

Technologies
 1. Input - Getting data in; getting commands; security
2. Output - Characteristics of different displays (e.g. video vs. photographs; speech vs. screen)
3. Communications - Between people, between devices, speed, etc. - What is connected to what?
4. Size of screen
5. GUI or not?
6. Sound?
7. Networked or stand alone.
8. Always on or dial in?
9. Real-time systems;
10. Safety critical systems;
11. Walk-up-and-use systems (e.g. kiosks) / Office systems / Palm pilot application / Web site.

Why Use It?

1. More detailed design brief
2. And/or specification
3. And/or user requirements document
4. Key points for evaluation

Participants Needed
One or more experts needed

Task List
1. brainstorm the variety of P, A, C and Ts that are possible
2. Explore design implications
3. Look for trade-offs between combinations of PACT
4. Think about how these might effect design

Conditions Required
1. Some information about (similar) system is required
2. Marketing personnel may be involved also

Example
1. pact analysis for a tourism website

Exercise
In groups of 2/3 identify

1. People, activities, contexts, technologies of an in-flight entertainment system using the

pointers above.
2. What are the design implications?

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created & designed by Vivienne Trulock for ilikecake
PACT Analysis Example 1
PACT Analysis For A Tourism Website
An essential part of our approach to designing the Interactive E-Tourist website is to make it as user-
centred as possible. Benyon et al (2005) acknowledge the PACT (People, Activities, Contexts,
Technologies) as a useful framework for thinking about a design situation in relation to an interactive
system. We felt that performing a PACT analysis would be useful for both our analysis and design
activities; understanding the current situations, seeing where possible improvements can be made and
envisioning future situations.

With the PACT analysis we were able to bring together all our research on our target users and scope
out the variety of different people, activities, contexts and technologies possible. From the analysis we
could develop clear and concrete scenarios of how our target users would be interacting with our E-
Tourist website. The results of the PACT analysis are presented below:

People
There are many ways in which people differ from one another, from physical appearance to the
attributes they have. People have different personalities and react to things in different ways. This
depends largely on the five senses i.e. hear, sight, smell, taste, and touch, so it is important for my
website to be friendly, usable, pleasurable for all kinds of people. An example of how this can be done,
is by making sure that my website caters for people with disabilities such as visibility impairment
(such as long/short sight, colour-blinded etc.).

The website should cater for this too. People also differ in psychological terms and so it is necessary
for my website to be accessible to those people who are not so able. People differ in their desires and
capabilities, so it is important that the website caters for all levels of cognitive ability. The website is a
heterogeneous website as the users will be based all around the world. The users will most probably
have different levels of computer literacy/knowledge, different language skills and different cognitive
and physical abilities.

Computer Literacy/Knowledge
Users accessing our site may be beginners, intermediate or experts, it is therefore, essential for the
website to cater for all its users. Because the site focuses on tourism in Edinburgh, our site will only be
accessed when people are considering a trip to Edinburgh. So, it is most probable that even those
users that are very computer/internet literate may still be beginners when they visit our website.

Cognitive Abilities
Because people are better at recognising things than remembering them, our site will be primarily 'see
and click'. This is so that users will be able to easily interact with the website.

Physical Abilities
It is essential for our website to be accessible for those users that are physically challenged. With
regards to our site, one of our goals is to cater for users with sight difficulties. There are different
types of visual impairment. The first is the difficulty of seeing small things. We will need to make sure
that the contents in our site can be magnified for such users. We will need to ensure that the quality
of the site is undisturbed when the information is magnified as this may cause confusion for many
users. The second difficulty is colour blindness. Colour blind people have great difficulty distinguishing
between certain colours, such as, yellow and blue and red and green. We will need to make sure that
colours that can affect colour-blindness are not mixed. The third difficulty is moderate to fully blind
users. We will need to ask ourselves how to cater for blind users. We need to consider whether users
can access the information in audio form. This is particularly important where images are used. We
need to consider, describing the images in text form, in such a way that blind users can effectively
understand the information about the images in the same way all other users can. Images include
tables, pictures charts, etc. Web designers also need to consider whether or not information and/or
the whole website can be converted into Braille. This is important for those users who prefer to use
Braille over audio.

Activities
There are many characteristics of activities that designers need to consider. These can be both simple
and complex. Before considering the characteristics need to be looked at it is essential that throughout
the project, the overall objectives are kept in mind and not forgotten about. Below are the main
characteristics of activities that need to be considered:

1. The regularity of activities- is the activity done everyday, monthly, or annually?

2. The response time from the system- how long does the website take to download?
3. The colours used in the website - they have to be deigned so that they are not an eye-sore
4. The textual information- what font, size is going to be used?

One of the main activities that users will have available to them is a navigation map of the royal mile.
It will have hotspots which people can click on; this will lead to a page with information on that page.
There will also be forums and blogs so that people can give their opinions etc. Users will also have the
ability to upload pictures of the city. The site will also allow users to see what tours are available for
them, for example family tours. There will also be a search facility for users to use if the need to. The
search facility will allow easy access of information.

Context
Activities constantly occur in a context, this section looks at how to examine the two collectively. The
context type that affects my website is the physical environment. Physical environment- this is
important for me so because I can understand what the physical environment of the website will be.
For example the website should cater for people who may be logging on to my web site in an area that
has slow internet access; this will be a problem if they decide that the website is taking its time to
upload. Users will access the website in different places such as the home, workplace, educational
institutions or internet cafes; therefore it is vital that the site is accessible for those visitors that use
different resolutions, operating systems, colour depths platforms and browsers. Please read the
baseline specification for further information.

Technologies
Technologies can carry out a variety of operations and usually consist of a lot of data, or information.
Interaction is required and so there is a need for a range of styles. There are many different
technologies that users can use to access our site. they tend to use different operating systems (such
as Windows 95, 98, NT, 2000, XP, Mac X etc), browsers (e.g., Internet Explorer 5 or 6, Netscape 7,
Mozilla, Opera, JAWS (screen reader for blind user)) and platforms (Windows, Macintosh etc)