PACT stands for People, Activities, Context and Technology.
In this chapter we will discuss the needs of our system by analysing these four properties.
From these needs we can later define the requirements of our system.
We need to know who the stakeholders are for our project.
Who are our players and what do they need?
What other people are involved, and what do they need?
Stakeholders of our interactive application:
The main public for our application will be students or younger people.
They will play this game for fun, probably not knowing about the metaphor that we chose for our project (that it represents a career).
You can make an application attractive for younger people by using flashing colours and moving images.
We have the advantage that we already decided to make an interactive video, so the moving images part is no problem.
We need the application to be accessible for our target group.
The most of the people who will use our application will be healty young people, meaning that our we do not have to make this accessible for people with for example no arms or bad eye sight.
But the text in our interactive application must be readable, of course.
The users will mainly be Dutch students, this is why Dutch as language is recommended.
What we do have to take in account is that the younger do not have to motivation to be concentrating on something for a longer time.
This is why our interactive application must be quick and dynamic.
We do not want the users to be busy with our game for longer than a half hour.
For the developers it is important that the maintenance to the product is as low as possible; the application must be bug free for this.
We want this project to be maintenance free but also playable for a few years, so other students can look at our project so they can get inspired.
We need to know what the goal is of our project.
When we know the goal, we can estimate how much time is needed to create the project and what we will need to create the footage of the project.
We also need to know how many times our project will be used.
What we want to make is an interactive video.
The goal of the game is to unlock and achieve the most expensive item in the game.
The only actions that we want people to make are the decisions that they can make in the video.
The actions can be self-explanatory, but it is recommended to give a quick explanation of the game beforehand.
It is intended that our interactive application will only be used once by each user.
For this reason there is no need for a downloadable version, or an mobile application.
It should be site based, so you can reach it on the internet where it will be available for anyone interested.
For this reason there also is no need for the people to register to use the application.
There is no need to save progress in cookies (session is enough, saved data will be gone when the window is closed).
We need to know when and where our application will be used. When you can predict when and where your application is used, you can know what requirements your application need to be useable in the environment.
Because mainly students will use our application, the context where our application will be used can be noisy places like classrooms. This makes it important for our application to be playable without sound. The game should be playable without sound, just the picture and video footage is enough.
We need to know what functional requirements are needed; what kind of technology is needed to for our interactive application. Must it be possible for our project to be playable on a mobile device?
Our main goal is to make the interactive application for a site, so the game can be played on a laptop tablet or PC. If we have time left, we can also choose to make the interactive application accessible for mobile phones.
We will have a simple application that does not communicate with other devices and no connections to databases.