Contextual Design: A Customer-Centered Approach to Systems Designs

If necessity is the mother of invention, then if you don't know what the users need you can't invent. Karen and Hugh present a step-by-step way to uncover, understand, and use those needs. If developers are not already using techniques like those presented here, they should read this book carefully to see what they are missing.

--Dan Bricklin
co-creator of VisiCalc

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

Authors:

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.

Table of Contents:

Chapter 1 Introduction
Chapter 2 Gathering Customer Data
Chapter 3 Principles of Contextual Inquiry
Chapter 4 Contextual Inquiry in Practice
Chapter 5 A Language of Work
Chapter 6 Work Models
Chapter 7 The Interpretation Session
Chapter 8 Consolidation
Chapter 9 Creating One View of the Customer
Chapter 10 Communicating to the Organization
Chapter 11 Work Redesign
Chapter 12 Using Data to Drive Design
Chapter 13 Design from Data
Chapter 14 System Design
Chapter 15 The User Environment Design
Chapter 16 Project Planning and Strategy
Chapter 17 Prototyping as a Design Tool
Chapter 18 From Structure to User Interface
Chapter 19 Iterating with a Prototype
Chapter 20 Putting It into Practice

Related Titles:

Software Engineering & Programming
Human-Computer Interaction
Information Technology