[Study] The Activity Checklist

The Activity Checklist: A tool for Representing the "Space" of the Context was introduced by my lecturer:

Reading: The Activity Checklist
Using the Activity Checklist...
Comments on the activity checklist

Reference for direct document link: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=306431

The Activity Theory does not provide a practical solution that can be directly applied to a specific issue. However, the Activity Checklist does.

This checklist use "Top Down" approach to help researcher gain a holistic understanding of the system context. This understanding is significant for designing system phases or evaluating existing system. The Top Down approach here can be understood as:

1. First, the checklist helps researcher to have a holistic area of interest

2. Secondly, it helps the researcher to concentrate on specific and identified areas in deeper levels.

This article also highlights the interconnection between Human and the around world. In order to gain deep and clear understanding about human/system, it is important to consider the surrounding environment and the "activities" that human/system use to interacts under a specific environment.  

There is also a hierarchical structure of activity includes

1. Activities -> to achieve motives (top-level objectives, need or a desire)

2. Actions -> to achieve goal 

3. Operations (functional subunits of actions, carry out automatically)  -> not have own goal

It is noted that the checklist should be used in combination with other techniques. Besides, it is important to look for patterns occurs across different sections in the checklist. The practitioner also need to be familiar with the tool and already know the ultimate purpose of using the checklist.

Due to the homework given by my lecturer which is about doing some research about an existing digital product and providing some suggested improvements, I will focus on using the Evaluation Checklist Version.

My chosen digital product is "Supermarket Self-Checkout System"

This Activity Checklist can possibly be used within the Step 4 of the IDEO summarized processes  that I mentioned in the [Study] IDEO Shopping Cart Summary to have a holistic view of my chosen digital product.

Then, mentioned in my lecturer's blog: Exercise: Experiment with a research method, I will try to apply one of 27 different interpretive research protocols based on the 'Learn', 'Look', and 'Ask' cards from IDEO to perform Step 5.

It is also significant to follow the instructions mentioned in my lecturer's blog.