Contextual Design

Last week in Chicago, I was fortunate to have the opportunity to spend 3 days with Shelley Wood from InContext Enterprises.

InContext Enterprises was founded by Karen Holtzblatt and Hugh Beyer in 1992 to provide customer-centered design and consulting services. We use Contextual Design and our deep knowledge of how to transform customer data into innovative product concepts to design transformative solutions for our clients.

I was impressed with the contextual design process and with Shelley as a presenter. For an introduction to the methodology take a look at Hugh and Karen’s book Contextual Design : A Customer-Centered Approach to Systems Designs. If you are currently using an XP or Agile methodology, you may wish to look at Shelley’s companion book Rapid Contextual Design : A How-to Guide to Key Techniques for User-Centered Design (Morgan Kaufmann Series in Interactive Technologies). I haven’t yet got my hands on the latter, but am looking forward to giving it a read.

Generally speaking, I see the contextual design process working very well with development teams already using XP (or modified XP) processes and am looking forward to integrating contextual design components into my best practices. If you are looking for a little more information - the folks at InContext released a paper recently called ‘An Agile Customer-Centered Method: Rapid Contextual Design’ which outlines how the Agile software development processes are a natural fit with contextual design.

One part of the CD process that struck me as particularily valuable and thought provoking was the Contextual Inquiry technique for understanding customer work practices.