USING INTERACTION FRAMEWORK TO GUIDE THE DESIGN OF INTERACTIVE SYSTEMS

Understanding the properties of interactions is essential to the design of effective interactive systems involving two or more agents, and to the evaluation of existing systems. This understanding can inform the design of multi-agent systems by helping the designer identify properties that a system should conform to. In addition, a focus on the properties of interactions can lead to a better understanding of the space of possibilities, by recognizing features of multi-agent systems which are often simply incidental outcomes of design, not explicitly considered in the design specification. We present an Interaction Framework, in which abstract interactional requirements and properties can be expressed in a way which is not biased towards the perspective of any one agent to the interaction. These can be used to derive requirements on the design of computer systems, to highlight those aspects of users which influence the properties of the interaction, and hence to guide the design of the interactive system.