A key factor to consider in HCI is the social setting, context or environment in which the behaviour occurs. Social factors are closely related to organisational factors. The study of social context with regards to HCI is related to many fields of study. Some of these fields are listed below:

- Social Psychology
- Sociology
- Anthropology
- Linguistics
- Philosophy
- Management Science
- Organisation Psychology

Groups of people (or actors) can be studied by experimental analysis which is a quantitative analysis technique. In this case, numbers, facts, and figures are recorded. Qualitative analysis looks at people's behaviour, their interactions, how they move about within a workspace, and how they communicate through that workspace. By investigating the context of activities, factors will be discovered that may be harder to represent or account for in a computerised system.

In analysing a current system, finding the answers to the following questions gives a foundation upon which a new design can be built:

- What information is represented in the system?
- What is this information for?
- How is this information changed as it moves about the system?
- How is the information represented and how does it move about the system?

When answering these questions, it is important to look beyond the surface and gain an understanding of how seemingly insignificant factors can sometimes play an important role in the current system. For example, documents within an organisation may be printed on paper and these documents are physically transported around the organisation. Simply converting this system to a computer based system where the documents are represented electronically may fail if all the important factors (including social and organisational factors) are not considered.

The physical documents may have notes scribbled on them as they circulate. The handwriting of certain employees may be recognisable and therefore other employees could use this to discern who has been writing on the document. They could then associate a certain degree of importance with these notes if they recognise them to be from the manager. How would this be represented in a computer system?

Organisations, in general, have a number of related parts which need to be to be taken into consideration. The Personnel, Technology, Work Organisation, and Culture are all important. Different people have varying positions and motivations. All the needs of the potential users of a system should be accounted for. The technology to be used should be appropriate and whether or not it will integrate well with the current system should be assessed. An organisation's culture influences the way work is done, and will involve unwritten rules and codes of practice / speech. Any new system needs to fit around this culture. The users should not be bent to fit into the new work processes created by a poorly designed system.

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