Objectives, strategies and resources as design drivers

Abstract

This paper builds on an existing model of human-computer interaction that focuses on the information structures employed as distributed information resources by users in deciding how to act. Such resources are not limited to internal mental constructs, but may be distributed between the single user and their environments, as representations in artefacts or the heads of other human actors. The concept of interaction strategy is introduced and used as a theoretical construct that generalises over a number of modelling perspectives in HCI. They are used to form a link between users’ high-level objectives and resources and the way they’re implemented. The usefulness in design of the general idea of distributed information resources and the concepts of strategies and objectives is illustrated by an example.