Hugh R. Beyer

Association for Computing Machinery

Contextual Inquiry is the core field research process of Contextual Design. In this chapter we describe Contextual Inquiry: the four principles of Context, Partnership, Interpretation, and Focus; how the Cool Concepts affect the interview situation; how to structure the interview itself; and how to tailor the interview to different kinds of project...

Telling stories of how people will work in the new system we’re designing helps the team keep the user’s life coherent. Storyboards are like freeze-frame movies representing to-be scenarios of the user’s practice. These stories ensure that a task or activity works—that the things the user wants to do are supported and that they can flow from step t...

The Traditional Contextual Design Models introduced with Contextual Design are still viable and offer insight, but we have found that we rarely use some of them. In this chapter we discuss the Traditional Models that we do use regularly and their variants: The Sequence Model; the Decision Point Model, derived from the Cultural Model; the Physical M...

Experience Models are derived from the insights of the Cool Project into how technology has become integral in everyday life. The Cool Project defined four ways that technology enhances life: accomplishment, connection, identity, and sensation. The Experience Models focus the team on these concepts to ensure that the team recognizes them when they...

In Contextual Design we drive product concept and structure from a deep understanding of the user’s world. Once the User Environment Design and Interaction Patterns are defined we have a working hypothesis of what we think will deliver value to the target users. But we don’t know if that is true—and our high-level design is likely to be missing low...

Any type of ethnographic or qualitative data is hard to organize. It’s complex and unstructured. The easiest methods of organizing the data, some sort of classification, tends to work against innovation—if you organize data into a classification you already know, how do you get new insight? The Affinity Diagram is an inductive process that bubbles...

Good product design ensures that the life of the user is enhanced, enlivened, and remains coherent. The best way to ensure a coherent life is to reinvent technology in the context of telling the story of the new ways that users' activities might be transformed by introducing technology. In this chapter we describe the Visioning workshop, a group st...

A new product or feature set must have the appropriate function and structure to support a natural flow of interaction. For that, Contextual Design uses the User Environment Design. The User Environment Design is a floor plan of the new product showing the places in the product, the function in that place, and the links between one place and anothe...

In this brief concluding chapter of the book we return to the core principles of Contextual Design: immersion, design for life, structural thinking, and team-based design. We wrap up insights and reflect on the future.

Choosing what to put into each release is a design and communication challenge—the cross-functional team, including additional players from development and marketing, must come to a shared understanding of what to release. Prioritization works best when it is based on what is of true value to the customer, what will make enough splash to be worth s...

User-centered design recognizes that all innovation has to start with an understanding of the user—with a real-world problem to solve. And good design needs an in-depth understanding of users' tasks, motivations, intents, strategies, and detailed steps, as well as an overall grasp of how they go through their days, what technology they depend on, w...

Products—even simple products such as cell phone apps—exist in a larger ecosystem of tools, processes, habits, and technology. Any new product has to fit into this ecosystem while simultaneously transforming the users’ lives in desirable ways. Not only must design team think about the users’ lives as a coherent whole, they must design a product tha...

More than ever, technology is inextricably integrated into daily life; designers today are truly reinventing daily life by creating a human-technical system, a way of living and working augmented by our products and systems. That product is no longer likely to be a large monolithic application but rather a constellation of products, apps, and platf...

Testing is an important part of any product's development process, and it's generally accepted that the sooner problems are found, the less it costs to fix them. Rough paper prototypes of the product design test the structure and user interface ideas before anything is committed to code. Paper prototypes, now a well-known, documented practice, supp...

User insights need to be shared across a design team so that everyone can see the issues and work toward a common goal. In Contextual Design, we make all design activities team based, so that everyone builds the insights and designs together. Every interview is captured and analyzed through an Interpretation Session, a team meeting where the whole...

At the core of innovation is immersion in the world of the user. Having produced the Affinity Diagram and consolidated models tuned to reveal insights and issues, the team is ready to use the models to drive design thinking. In this chapter we describe the Wall Walk, a process whereby the team interacts with the consolidated data, letting it stimul...

A critical driver of success for product teams is to be able to organize the team and the project effectively. In this chapter we describe how to set the project's scope and focus to map the business mission and willingness to innovate. We describe how to put your team together, considering both cross-functional roles and the leadership needed on t...

A design for a product must define the look and layout of the product’s screens. Interaction Patterns help the team think structurally about the high-level structure of each page or screen in the User Environment Design. We give principles of design and layout to ensure this interface structure works for the user’s activities and defines a user int...

User-centered design asks people to go out in the field and run inquiries to understand users. But it’s still a challenge to see what matters when you’re there. The user’s world is complex, overwhelming, and full of a million details—some of which matter for any design problem and many of which don’t. As user research teams and organizations have b...

Contextual Design: Design for Life, Second Edition, describes the core techniques needed to deliberately produce a compelling user experience. Contextual Design (CD) was first invented in 1988 to drive a deep understanding of the user into the design process. It has been used in a wide variety of industries and taught in universities all over the w...

Download Free Sample Contextual Design is a user-centered design process that uses in-depth field research to drive innovative design. Contextual Design was first invented in 1988 and has since been used in a wide variety of industries and taught in universities all over the world. It is a complete front-end design process rooted in Contextual Inqu...

With the introduction and popularization of Agile methods of software development, existing relationships and working agreements between user experience groups and developers are being disrupted. Agile methods introduce new concepts: the Product Owner, the Customer (but not the user), short iterations, User Stories. Where do UX professionals fit in...

Agile methods have proven their worth in keeping a development team focused on producing high-quality code quickly. But these methods generally have little to say about how to incorporate user-centered design techniques. Also the question has been raised whether agile methods can scale up to larger systems design . In this paper we show how one use...

Field research techniques generate large amounts of unstructured data about users: their work practice, attitudes, strategies, motivations, and so forth. Managing, organizing, communicating, and making sense of this complex and rich data is an ongoing problem for HCI researchers. InContext performs field research and design for its clients, so we h...

Field Methods are a collection of tools and techniques for conducting studies of users, their tasks, and their work environments in the actual context of those environments. The promise of such methods is that they help teams design products that are both useful and usable by providing data about what people really do. Participants in this forum wi...

Field Methods are a collection of tools and techniques for conducting studies of users, their tasks, and their work environments in the actual context of those environments. The promise of such methods is that they help teams design products that are both useful and usable by providing data about what people really do. Participants in this forum wi...

Contextual techniques--Contextual Design and other methods of field research--are recognized by the industry as critical for the development of products that work for their users. But there is still uncertainty as to how these techniques can be used to drive the development of totally new products--products that create new markets or transform thei...

An abstract is not available.

Field data gathering techniques such as Contextual Inquiry enable a design team to gather the detailed data they need. These techniques produce enormous amounts of information on how the customers of a system work. This creates a new problem—how to represent all this detail in a coherent, comprehensible form, which can be a suitable basis for desig...

Field data gathering techniques such as Contextual Inquiry enable a design team to collect the detailed customer data they need for their projects. But when a team wants to apply contextual techniques to their own situation, they are faced with a host of problems. What project should they start with? Is it better to introduce them early or late in...

Contextual techniques are used to collect in-depth information on how people work. Through these techniques engineering teams collect the knowledge they need to design products that fit their users well. However, going from customer data to design is not trivial; designers have to know how to look at the data and how to see implications for design...

A new computer system changes how its customers work. In developing such system, it also means designing not only the system itself but also the new work practice it will support. In this discussion, the relationship created through Contextual Inquiry is described. The process of making a relationship fit the needs of design is demonstrated and the...

An abstract is not available.

ABSTRACT

The bolt of lightning that sparks a new product idea is totally unpredictable. The authors consider the crucial question for a product-development organization: what context allows creativity to happen and how does an organization call down the lightning? They consider the example of spreadsheet design.< >

Building today's systems requires a more intimate understanding of users' work than ever before. Computers are smaller and more common and interfaces are more powerful. In the paper, the authors summarize their experience with customer-centered design. They describe the steps they have refined through their work on design problems. They describe th...