Contextual design

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Contents 1 Introduction 2 Process Overview 2.1 Collecting data - contextual inquiry 2.2 Work modeling 2.3 Consolidation 2.4 Work redesign 2.5 The User Environment Design 2.6 Test with customers 3 Uses, Adaptations, and Adaptations 4 References 5 External links

[edit] Introduction

Contextual Design (CD) is a user-centered design process developed by Hugh Beyer and Karen Holtzblatt. It incorporates ethnographic methods for gathering data relevant to the product, field studies, rationalizing workflows, system and designing the human-computer interfaces (HCI). In practice this means that researchers' aggregate data from customers in the field, where people are living and applying these findings into a final product ^[1]. Contextual Design can be seen as an alternative for engineering and feature driven models of creating new systems.

[edit] Process Overview

The Contextual Design process consists of the following top-level steps: Contextual inquiry, Work modeling, Consolidation, Work redesign, User Environment Design, Prototyping and Implementation (not covered in this article).

[edit] Collecting data - contextual inquiry

Contextual inquiry involves collecting detailed information about customer work practice by observing and talking with the user about the work while s/he works, in the normal context of the work. Researcher ought to stay on the background and let the user lead the situation as much as possible. This means that researcher tries to form a partnership with customer i.e. learning (but not doing) as an apprentice while the customer is the master of the work. This helps the researcher understand the customer's work. The goal is to understand how and why something is done or why something is not done ^[1].

[edit] Work modeling

Work practices are analyzed and detailed work models are created in order to understand the workflow. Contextual design consists of five work models which are used to model the work tasks and details of the working environment. These work models are ^[2]:

• Flow model - represents the coordination, interaction and responsibilities of the people in a certain work practice
• Sequence model - represents the required steps to accomplish a certain activity
• Cultural model - represents the norms, influences, and pressures that are present in the work environment
• Artifact model - represents the documents or other products that are created while working. Artifacts often have a structure or styling that could represent the user's way of structuring the work
• Physical model - represents the physical environment where the work tasks are accomplished; often, there are multiple physical models representing, e.g., office layout, network topology, or the layout of tools on a computer display.

[edit] Consolidation

Data from individual customer interviews are analyzed in order to reveal patterns and the structure across distinct interviews. Models of the same time can be consolidated together (but not generalized--detail must be maintained). Another method of processing the observations is making an affinity diagram ("wall"), as described by Beyer & Holtzblatt ^[1]:

• A single observation is written on each piece of paper
• Individual notes are grouped according the similarity of their contents
• These groups are labeled with colored post-it notes, each color representing a distinct level in the hierarchy
• Then the groups are combined with other groups to get the final construct of observations in a hierarchy of up to three levels.

Also the design ideas and relevant issues that arise during the process should be included to affinity diagram. The affinity diagram is a Bottom-up method.

[edit] Work redesign

Work redesign uses the consolidated data to drive conversations about how to improve work by providing a system that better supports the new work practice. The redesigned work practice is captured in a vision, a story of how customers will do their work in the new system that is being designed ^[1]. A vision includes the system, its delivery, and support structures to make the new work practice successful. The team develops the vision in storyboards and sketches capturing scenarios of how people will work with the new system. Understanding the current way of working, its structure and the complete workflow helps the design team address the problems and design the new workflow.

[edit] The User Environment Design

The User Environment Design 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. CD uses the User Environment Design (UED) diagram, which displays the focus areas, i.e., areas which are visible to the user or which are relevant to the user. Focus area can defined further as functions in a system that supports a certain type or part of the work. The UED also presents how the focus areas relate to each other and shows the links between focus areas ^[1].

[edit] Test with customers

Testing the design ideas with paper prototypes or even with more sophisticated demos before the implementation phase helps the designers communicate with customers about the new system and develop the design further. Prototypes test the structure of a User Environment Design and initial user interface ideas, as well as the understanding of the work, before the implementation phase ^[2]. Depending on the results of the prototype test, more iterations or alternative designs may be needed.

[edit] Uses, Adaptations, and Adaptations

Contextual design has primarily been used for the design of computer information systems, including hardware ^[3] and software. ^[4]. Parts of contextual design have been adapted for use as a usability evaluation method.^[5]

Contextual design has also been used as a means of teaching user-centered design/Human–computer interaction at the university level.^[6][7]

A more lightweight approach to contextual design has been developed by its originators to address an oft-heard criticism that the method is too labor-intensive or lengthy for some needs.^[8]. Yet others find the designer/user engagement promoted by contextual design to be too brief.^[9]

[edit] References

1. ^ ^{a b c d e} Beyer, H. & Holtzblatt, K. (1998). Contextual Design: Defining Customer-Centered Systems. San Francisco: Morgan Kaufmann. ISBN: 1-55860-411-1
2. ^ ^{a b} Holtzblatt, K: Contextual Design: Experience in Real Life. Mensch & Computer 2001. (online [1])
3. ^ Curtis, P., Heiserman, T., Jobusch, D., Notess, M., & Webb, J. (1999). Customer-focused design data in a large, multi-site organization. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems: the CHI Is the Limit (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States, May 15 - 20, 1999). CHI '99. ACM Press, New York, NY, pp. 608-615.
4. ^ Rockwell, C. 1999. Customer connection creates a winning product: building success with contextual techniques. interactions 6, 1 (Jan. 1999), pp. 50-57.
5. ^ McDonald, S., Monahan, K., and Cockton, G. 2006. Modified contextual design as a field evaluation method. In Proceedings of the 4th Nordic Conference on Human-Computer interaction: Changing Roles (Oslo, Norway, October 14 - 18, 2006). A. Mørch, K. Morgan, T. Bratteteig, G. Ghosh, and D. Svanaes, Eds. NordiCHI '06, vol. 189. ACM Press, New York, NY, 437-440.
6. ^ Lárusdóttir, M. K. "Using Rapid Contextual Design at Reykjavik University", accepted paper for the workshop named "HCIEd.2006-1 inventivity: Teaching theory, design and innovation in HCI" held by British Computer Society HCI Group (BHCIG), the International Federation of Information Processing (IFIP) WG13.1 Education, and the Irish Computer Society" in Limrick in Ireland, 23. - 24.March 2006.
7. ^ Weinberg, J. B. and Stephen, M. L. 2002. Participatory design in a human-computer interaction course: teaching ethnography methods to computer scientists. In Proceedings of the 33rd SIGCSE Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education (Cincinnati, Kentucky, February 27 - March 03, 2002). SIGCSE '02. ACM Press, New York, NY, pp. 237-241
8. ^ Holtzblatt, K., Wendell, J.B., & Wood, S. 2005. Rapid Contextual Design: A How-to guide to key techniques for user-centered design. San Francisco: Morgan-Kaufmann.
9. ^ Hartswood, M., Procter, R., Slack, R., Soutter, J., Voß, A., and Rouncefield, M. 2002. The benefits of a long engagement: from contextual design to the co-realisation of work affording artefacts. In Proceedings of the Second Nordic Conference on Human-Computer interaction (Aarhus, Denmark, October 19 - 23, 2002). NordiCHI '02, vol. 31. ACM Press, New York, NY, 283-286.

[edit] External links

• Contextual inquiry in Usability net