58 PART | II ITS users
• Activities and actions supported by the ITS.
• How the activities fit the users’ objectives.
• Critical activities.
• Purpose of actions and activity of users.
• The structure of social interactions within an activity.
• Tasks to achieve the objective
- Analysis development of the activity system.
This step involves defining, in depth, the components of the given activity,
namely, the subject, object, community, rules, and division of labor. This study
began by interpreting the various components of the activity triangle (Fig. 4.1)
in terms of the situation being examined.
- Analysis of the activity structure.
This step defines the purpose of the activity system. It involves the analysis
of the activity structure including all the activities that engage the subject. Each
activity is decomposed into actions and operations. The following questions can
be used to analyze the activity structure:
- How is the work done in practice?
- How has the work evolved over time?
- What are the different phases of the activity?
- What is the goal of the activity and how does it relate to other goals?
- Who performs the actions for each activity?
- How do we analyze the operations for each action the user performs?
The analysis of the activity structure of the technology in ITS should begin
with the identification of the goals of concrete actions then move to top-level
actions and activities, followed by lower-level actions and operations. It is
important to define:
- The end-users of the application.
- People involved in the design.
- Goals for each action.
- Limitations of the technology.
- The conflicts between various users’ goals.
- The criteria for evaluating the system’s ability to achieve user goals
ITS requirements can be captured by analyzing all the three levels of the
activity hierarchy: activity, action, and operation. To do this, the hierarchi-
cal notation, which is commonly used for task analysis is recommended.
(Shepherd, 2001).
- Analyze contradictions within the activity system
It is possible to reconstruct the system by identifying the tensions and inter-
actions foreseen between the elements of an activity system. Doing so can help