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Contextual Design – Defining Best in Class Applications

By Karen Holtzblatt, Incontext Enterprises – 11/19/2004

German version • This article has also been published in SAP INFO 122

For much of its history, interface design reflected the developer's, not the user's needs. In the new intuitive, user-friendly age, the design team works with users from the earliest design phases to assure that the interface meets real needs. Contextual design is a model of how this system works in practice.

Great applications come from a marriage of the detailed understanding of a customer need with the in-depth understanding of technology. Software vendors can routinely deliver applications that delight their customers if their designers are steeped in real user data. When the team is involved in collecting and interpreting user data, they can see their customers' challenges and opportunities for improving real people's lives with technology.

Contextual design (CD) is a user-centered design process that helps a team agree on what their customers need and how to design a system for them. Contextual design is used by SAP, universities, businesses and other product development companies all over the world to design their systems. The steps of CD bring customer data into the design process while guiding a team in working with this data and each other. The following is a brief overview of the CD steps.

 

Contextual Inquiry – Getting Real User Data

The first challenge of design is to understand your users: their issues, tasks, collaborations, information needs, and values. Yet work becomes so habitual to the people who do it that they often have difficulty articulating exactly what they do and why they do it. Contextual inquiry is a one-on-one field interviewing technique. Team members observe and talk with users in their workplace to see their tasks and motivations. This ensures that the team captures the real business practice and daily activities of the people the system is to support, not just self-reported practice or official policies.

 

Interpretation Sessions and Work Modeling – Understanding the Data as a Team

Interpretation sessions bring the team together to hear the whole story of each field interview. The events of one interview are retold while the team captures key issues and draws work models. Work models – diagrams depicting different aspects of the work – help the team see and record the complexities of work practice.

An interpretation session brings all team members' unique perspectives to bear on the data so that the team develops a shared understanding of the requirements. CD calls for a cross-functional team to ensure that anyone involved in creating the deliverable participates in understanding the user directly. This speeds delivery by simplifying communication and eliminating disagreement over what users want.

 

Data Consolidation – Creating One Coherent Picture of the User Population

Designing for a whole user population depends on seeing the common aspects of the work that different people do. Consolidation brings data from individual field interviews together so the team can see common patterns and structure without losing individual variation.

The affinity diagram brings issues and insights across all users together into a wall-sized, hierarchical diagram to reveal the scope of the problem. Consolidated work models bring together each separate type of work model to reveal common strategies and intents while retaining and organizing individual differences. Consolidated data reveals the user needs, system requirements, and opportunities for streamlining user practice. And it produces reusable corporate data.

 

Visioning and Storyboards – Redesigning the Work to Improve it

The team's challenge is to invent a system which will improve work in ways users and businesses care about. The team reviews the consolidated data, capturing key issues and design ideas. This helps the team to start thinking broadly instead of looking for little fixes to existing systems.

Next, the team runs a visioning session to invent a story of how the system will streamline and transform the users' work. The vision is a hand-drawn sketch on a flip chart including manual activities, redesigned business processes, and system ideas to make the new work practice successful. Visioning focuses the team on how to provide technology to help people get their jobs done, rather than on individual features of an application.

Using the vision as a guide, the team now works out the details through storyboarding. A storyboard is as set of "freeze-frame" sketches capturing scenarios of how people will work with the new system, including manual practices, initial user-interface concepts, business rules, and automation assumptions.

 

User Environment Design

The new system must have the appropriate functions and structure to support a natural work flow. Just as architects draw floor plans to see the structure and flow of a house, designers need to see the "floor plan" of their new system – hidden behind user-interface drawings, implemented by an object model, and responding to the customer work. This floor plan is typically not made explicit in other design processes.

The user environment design (UED) captures the floor plan of the new system. It shows each part of the system, how it supports the user's work, exactly what function is available in that part, and how the user gets to and from other parts of the system – without tying this structure to any particular user interface. With an explicit UED, a team can make sure the structure is right for the user, plan how to roll out new features in a series of releases, and manage the work of the project across engineering teams.

 

Paper Prototypes and Mock-up Interviews

It's generally accepted that the sooner problems are found, the less it costs to fix them. So it's important to test and iterate a design early. Paper prototyping develops rough mock-ups of the system using Post-its to represent windows, dialog boxes, buttons, and menus. The design team tests these prototypes with users in their workplace, replaying real work events in the proposed system. When the user discovers problems, they co-design changes by redesigning the prototype to fit the user's needs.

Rough paper prototypes of the system test the structures of the UED and initial user-interface ideas before anything is committed to code. Refining the design with users gives the team a reliable way to resolve disagreements and work out the next layer of requirements. The team tests the design through several rounds of iteration, changing the design between revisions to improve the system and drive system details. Running prototype testing can further test the details of the interaction and visual design.

 

Final Words

These are the steps of contextual design. Whether you use every step of CD or one of the Rapid CD variants, these techniques will help you better meet your customers' needs. Consulting companies like InContext can help you learn contextual techniques through classroom training and side-by-side coaching. Or they can gather the data for you with varying levels of participation from your team – using that data, their experts, and your business and technical expertise to develop and test the application design. Whether you need to speed up your development process or to make sure you develop the right thing for your customers, adopting a user-centered design process can help improve your business.

 

Biography

Karen Holtzblatt, CEO
Karen is the visionary behind InContext's unique Contextual Design approach. Karen's combination of technological and psychological expertise provides the creative framework for driving the development innovative designs and design processes.

Karen co-founded InContext Enterprises in 1992, delivering customer-centered designs and coaching product teams in the Contextual Design process throughout the industry. Recognized as a leader in the design community her book Contextual Design: Defining Customer Centered Systems is used by companies and universities all over the world. InContext's CDTools product launched in 2004 is the first tool suite to support teams in doing customer-centered design. Karen's extensive experience with teams and all types of work and life practice provides the back bone to the innovation and reliable quality consistently delivered by InContext's teams.

Karen has more than 20 years of teaching experience, professionally and in university settings. She holds a doctorate in applied psychology from the University of Toronto.

 

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