paper: contextual design

Contextual Design: Introduction (Chapter 1)
Hugh Beyer and Karen Holtzblatt
Contextual Design: Defining Customer Centered Systems, 1998

This book chapter introduces the difficulties of customer centered design in organizations, and proposes the methodology of Contextual Design as a set of processes for overcoming these difficulties and achieving successful designs that benefit both the customer and the business.

• Introduction
• The challenge of system design is to fit into the fabrice of everyday life
• Contextual Design is a backbone for organizing a customer-centered design process
• Challenges for Design
• Collect and manage complex customer data w/o losing detail
• Design a response that is good for business and customers
• Foster agreement and cooperation between stakeholders
• Make the process practical given time constraints
• Challenge of Fitting into Everyday Life
• Support the way users want to work
• Don’t increase work and frustration with automation
• Creating an Optimal Match to the Work
• Innovate through step-by-step introduction of new work practice
• Keeping in Touch with the Customer
• Organizational growth isolates developers from customers
• Sitting with the users makes cross-departmental projects hard
• Challenge of Design in Organizations
• Breaking up work across groups creates communication problems
• Different organizational functions focus on different parts of a coherent process
• Every function needs customer data, but it has to be the right kind of data
• Data showing what is wrong is frustrating if builders can’t fix it
• Cross-functional design teams create a shared perspective
• Teamwork in the Physical Environment
• Organizations have no real spaces for continuing team work
• Managing Face-to-Face Design
• Face-to-face work depends on managing the interpersonal
• Disagreements can lead to an incoherent design
• Customer-centered design keeps user work coherent by creating a well-working team
• Challenge of Design from Data
• Learn how to see the implications of customer data
• Recognize that designing from customer data is a new skill
• Don’t expect to find requirements littering the landscape at the customer site
• Complexity of Work
• The complexity of work is overwhelming, so people oversimplify
• Maintaining a coherent response
• A systemic response --- not a list of features --- keeps user work coherent.
• Diagrams of work and the system help a team think systemically
• Contextual Design
• Contextual Design externalizes good design practice for a team
• Contextual Inquiry
• Talk to the customers while they work
• Work modeling
• Represents peoples work in diagrams
• Consolidation
• Pull individual diagrams together to see the work of all customers
• Work redesign
• Crate a corporate response to the customers’ issues
• User Environment Design
• Structure the system work model to fit the work
• Mock-up and test with customers
• Test your ideas with users through paper prototypes
• Putting into practice
• Tailor Contextual Design to your organization