Contextual Design : A Customer-Centered Approach to Systems Designs |
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| Hugh Beyer, Karen Holtzblatt |
| August 1997, Academic Press/Morgan Kaufmann, Paperback, 350 pages, ISBN 1558604111
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Synopsis
Contextual design is a state-of-the-art approach to designing products directly
from an understanding of how the customer works and what the customer needs.
Based on a method developed and taught by the authors, this is a practical,
hands-on guide that articulates the underlying principles of contextual design
and shows how to use them to address different problems, constraints, and organizational
situations.
This book introduces a customer-centered approach to business by showing how
data gathered from people while they work can drive the definition of a product
or process while supporting the needs of teams and their organizations. This
is a practical, hands-on guide for anyone trying to design systems that reflect
the way customers want to do their work. The authors developed Contextual Design,
the method discussed here, through their work with teams struggling to design
products and internal systems. In this book, you'll find the underlying principles
of the method and how to apply them to different problems, constraints, and
organizational situations.
Contextual Design enables you to
- gather detailed data about how people work and use systems
- develop a coherent picture of a whole customer population
- generate systems designs from a knowledge of customer work
- diagram a set of existing systems, showing their relationships, inconsistencies,
redundancies, and omissions
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Foreword
Preface
Chapter 1 Introduction
The challenges for design
The challenge of fitting into everyday life
Creating an optimal match to the work
Keeping in touch with the customer
The challenge of design in organizations
Teamwork in the physical environment
Managing face-to-face design
The challenge of design from data
The complexity of work
Maintaining a coherent response
Contextual Design
Part 1 Understanding the Customer
Chapter 2 Gathering Customer Data
Marketing doesn't provide design data
The rocky partnership between IT and its clients
Improving communication with the business
The role of intuition in design
Contextual Inquiry reveals hidden work structure
Chapter 3 Principles of Contextual Inquiry
The master/apprentice model
The four principles of Contextual Inquiry
Context
Partnership
Interpretation
Focus
The contextual interview structure
Chapter 4 Contextual Inquiry in Practice
Setting project focus
Designing the inquiry for commercial products
Designing the inquiry for IT projects
Designing the interviewing situation
Deciding who to interview Making it work
Part 2 Seeing Work
Chapter 5 A Language of Work
Using language to focus thought
Graphical languages give a whole picture
Work models provide a language for seeing work
Work models reveal the important distinctions
Chapter 6 Work Models
The flow model
Recognizing communication flow
Creating a bird's-eye view of the organization
The sequence model
Collecting sequences during an interview
The artifact model
Collecting artifacts during an interview
Inquiring into an artifact
The cultural model
Recognizing the influence of culture
Making culture tangible
The physical model
Seeing the impact of the physical environment
Showing what matters in the physical environment
The five faces of work
Chapter 7 The Interpretation Session
Building a shared understanding
The structure of an interpretation session
Team makeup
Roles
Running the session
The sharing session
Part 3 Seeing across Customers
Chapter 8 Consolidation
Creating one representation of a market
A single representation is a marketing and planning tool
Facilitate the partnership between IT and customers
IT can be the voice for coherent business processes
Representations of work stabilize requirements
Seeing the whole
Chapter 9 Creating One View of the Customer
The affinity diagram
Consolidating flow models
Consolidating sequence models
Consolidating artifact models
Consolidating physical models
Consolidating cultural models
The thought process of consolidation
Chapter 10 Communicating to the Organization
Communication Techniques
Walking the affinity
Walking the consolidated models
Touring the design room
Tailoring the language to the audience
Marketing
Customers
Engineering
Management
Usability
Models manage the conversation
Part 4 Innovation from Data
Chapter 11 Work Redesign
Customer data drives innovation
Creative design incorporates diversity
Contextual Design introduces a process for invention
Work redesign as a distinct design step
Chapter 12 Using Data to Drive Design
The consolidated flow model
Role switching
Role strain
Role sharing
Role isolation
Process fixes
Target the customer
Pitfalls
The consolidated cultural model
Interpersonal give-and-take
Pervasive values
Public relations
Process fixes
Pitfalls
The consolidated physical model
The reality check
Work structure made real
Movement and access
Partial automation
Process fixes
Pitfalls
Consolidated sequence models
What the user is up to
How users approach a task
Unnecessary steps
What gets them started
Process fixes
Pitfalls
Consolidated artifact models
Why it matters
What it says
How it chunks
What it looks like
Pitfalls
Using metaphors
Using models for design
Chapter 13 Design from Data
Walking the data
Priming the brain
Creating a vision Creating a common direction
Making the vision real
Process and organization design
Marketing plans
System design
Storyboards
Redesigning work
Part 5 System Design
Chapter 14 System Design
Keeping the user's work coherent
Breaking up the problem breaks up the work
A system has its own coherence
The structure of a system
Designing structure precedes UI design
The User Environment Design
Representing the system work model
The User Environment formalism in the design process
Chapter 15 The User Environment Design
The reverse User Environment Design
Building the User Environment from storyboards
Defining a system with the User Environment Design
User Environment Design walkthroughs
Probing User Environment Design structure
Chapter 16 Project Planning and Strategy
Planning a series of releases
Partitioning a system for implementation
Coordinating a product strategy
Driving concurrent implementation
Part 6 Prototyping
Chapter 17 Prototyping as a Design Tool
The difficulty of communicating a design
Including customers in the design process
Using paper prototypes to drive design
Prototyping as a communication tool
Chapter 18 From Structure to User Interface
Using the User Environment Design to drive the UI
Mapping to a windowing UI
Mapping to a command-line UI
Mapping to UI controls
A process to design the UI
Chapter 19 Iterating with a Prototype
Building a paper prototype
Running a prototype interview
Context
Partnership
Interpretation
Focus
The structure of an interview
Setup
Introduction
Transition
The interview
Wrap-up
The interpretation session
Iteration
Completing a design
Conclusion
Chapter 20 Putting It into Practice
The principles of Contextual Design
The principle of data
The principle of the team
The principle of design thinking
Breaking up design responsibilities across groups
Addressing different design problems
Team structure
Maintaining a strategic customer focus
Handling organizational change
Designing the design process
Afterword
Readings and Resources
References
Index
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| Hugh Beyer and Karen Holtzblatt are co-founders of InContext Enterprises, Inc., a firm that works with companies coaching teams to design products, product strategies, and information systems from customer data. Karen Holtzblatt developed the Contextual Inquiry field data gathering technique that forms the core of Contextual Design and is now taught and used world-wide. Hugh Beyer has pioneered the link between the customer-centered front end and object-oriented design. |
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Review-Date: 6/27/2010 Rating: 3 Summary: Contextual design
The book is as described by the seller, but there where shipping mishandling and shipping took to long.
Review-Date: 6/23/2009 Rating: 4 Summary: Interesting
I will review this product from its material standpoint and not from an implementation standpoint. The book was part of a class I took in Carnegie Mellon. It makes for a fascinating read. Some of the topics are excellent food for thought for human/user centric design of software products. The class assignments involved mock implementations of the concepts described in the book which was fun.
Coming from an embedded world, I haven‘t had a chance to implement these ideas in my day to day work but if I ever work on a user centric product, I hope to try some of the ideas.
Good read.
Review-Date: 2/6/2008 Rating: 3 Summary: Great methodology– for some things.
The authors aren‘t really suggesting anything new. If you can do KJ analysis, you pretty much have this methodology nailed down. The book details a framework within which to assess what can be learned through observation and contextual inquiry (shadowing). The presentation can be somewhat redundant.
While I recommend contextual inquiry to analysts as it is presented here, I most certainly wouldn‘t recommend their ensuiong design process. It has many holes and there are better already–existing methods to complete the design process.
Review-Date: 4/26/2007 Rating: 1 Summary: In how many ways can you say it...
If you‘ve got a memory like a gold fish this might be a great book. For others this book is likely to be repetative to the extreme. Half of the pages could easily be cut out. The same message gets repeated over and over again. Many of the ideas are great but.. for many people out there time is a limiting factor, thats my largest issue with both the book and the method in general.
Review-Date: 5/13/2004 Rating: 1 Summary: Techniques requirement
This book provided a method to gather requirement efficiently but the rest of the method should be revised.
Review-Date: 2/13/2002 Rating: 4 Summary: Great book, right price
Beyer & Holtzblatt have done an excellent job describing the process of contextual design. I‘m currently implementing a new company–wide business process, in conjunction with co–workers, and thought it would simply be a good idea to both refresh my memory, gather ideas, and form concepts that would be helpful in the organizational design process. This book has undoubtedly served the purposes I‘ve wanted it to. Again, excellent book – worth the buy.
Review-Date: 11/26/2001 Rating: 1 Summary: Useless
This is quite a useless book about an otherwise interesting subject. The writers give redundancy and repetition new meaning as they repeat themselves by saying the same thing over and over innumerable ways. That said, the examples scattered throughout the text are the most interesting part.
Review-Date: 8/21/2001 Rating: 3 Summary: Hard to Penetrate
I have read a lot of glowing reviews about this book but I have found that, while it is good, I think it is too dense to be great. It is a very difficult read. The writing style is very heavy. I would love a one–pager of the ideas in this book. My sense is that it would read "Watch Users." There are better books on the subject. I like "The Inmates are Running the Asylum."
Review-Date: 7/7/2001 Rating: 5 Summary: explains the customer‘s role in product design
Contextual Design explains the customer‘s role in product design to high–tech product teams. It gives techniques and procedures on how to integrate customers (and potential customers) into the development cycle. The most important section for product managers is the chapter on techniques for interviewing (called "Contextual Inquiry" in the book‘s lexicon) details how to conduct an onsite interview, what to watch for, and which follow–up questions to ask. While geared to the systems analyst, the book is valuable to anyone responsible for gathering prospect problems at an onsite meeting.
Review-Date: 6/20/2001 Rating: 3 Summary: At last, a strong and flexible user–centered design method
With all the talk about user–centered design, it‘s a relief to find a book that describes a well–defined and flexible approach to it. The authors have really done their homework. I especially appreciated the explanation of approaching site visits as if you were an apprentice.However, I really wish this book had been more concise. I kept wanting the authors to get to the point. Perhaps I‘ll appreciate this book‘s detail later, when I‘m one day deep in the throes of a project that uses some or all of this approach. But today I merely wanted to become familiar with this approach and understand its benefits.
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