Hugh Beyer

Apprenticing with the customer

how its customers work. Designing such a system requires intimate knowledge of customers’ work and motives to ensure that the system supports them well. The creation of a new system implicitly means designing the new work practice it will support. Because system design is so intimately involved with how people work, designers need better approaches to gathering customer requirements. The current interest in participatory design, ethnographic techniques, and field research techniques grows out of the recognition that traditional interviewing and surveying techniques are not adequate for designing today’s applications. These new approaches seek to improve requirements definition by creating new relationships between designers and customers [11]. It is the relationship between designers and customers that determines how well the design team understands the customer problem. This includes not only the overall relationship between design team and customer community, but the individual, minute-by-minute process by which a single designer works with a single customer to understand the customer’s work. It is by understanding each person in the context of that person’s work that the team comes to understand the whole work problem [5, 13]. Through face-to-face interaction, customers and designers define

An Agile Customer-Centered Method: Rapid Contextual Design

Agile methods have proven their worth in keeping a development team focused on producing high- quality code quickly. But these methods generally have little to say about how to incorporate user-centered design techniques. Also the question has been raised whether agile methods can scale up to larger systems design. In this paper we show how one user-centered design method, Contextual Design (CD), forms a natural fit with agile methods and recount our experience with such combined projects.

Contextual design: using customer work models to drive systems design

Field data gathering techniques such as Contextual Inquiry enable a design team to gather the detailed data they need. These techniques produce enormous amounts of information on how the customers of a system work. This creates a new problem---how to represent all this detail in a coherent, comprehensible form, which can be a suitable basis for design. An affinity diagram effectively shows the scope of the customer problem, but is less effective at capturing and coherently representing the details of how people work. Design teams need a way to organize this detail so they can use it in their own development process.In this tutorial we present our latest methods for representing detailed information about work practice and using these representations to drive system design. These methods have been adopted over the last few years by major product development and information systems organizations. We show how to represent the work of individual users in models, how to generalize these to describe a whole market or department, and how to use these to drive innovative design. We present the process by which we build and use the models and practice key steps. We show how these methods fit into the overall design process, and summarize Contextual Design, which gathers field data and uses it to drive design through a well-defined series of steps.The tutorial is appropriate for those who have used field techniques, especially Contextual Inquiry, and would like to put more structure on the process of using field data.We use shopping as our example of work practice throughout this tutorial, since shopping is simple and understood by everyone. We encourage participants to go grocery shopping shortly before the tutorial, and bring any shopping list they may have used, their store receipt, and a drawing of the store layout and their movement through it.

Usability in practice: field methods evolution and revolution

Field Methods are a collection of tools and techniques for conducting studies of users, their tasks, and their work environments in the actual context of those environments. The promise of such methods is that they help teams design products that are both useful and usable by providing data about what people really do. Participants in this forum will address: the origins and framework of Contextual Design the application of field methods to task analysis a review of ways to adapt these methods to practical constraints a discount approach to field studies.

Calling down the lightning [software design]

The bolt of lightning that sparks a new product idea is totally unpredictable. The authors consider the crucial question for a product-development organization: what context allows creativity to happen and how does an organization call down the lightning? They consider the example of spreadsheet design.<<ETX>>

Getting started on a contextual project

Field data gathering techniques such as Contextual Inquiry enable a design team to collect the detailed customer data they need for their projects. But when a team wants to apply contextual techniques to their own situation, they are faced with a host of problems. What project should they start with? Is it better to introduce them early or late in the process? Given all the different possible techniques, which will work best for the specific project chosen? How should the customers be chosen and how should visits to them be set up? Who should be on the project? Its no wonder people find it hard to get started with these new techniques in their own organizations.This tutorial gets participants over the roadblocks in the way of using contextual techniques in their projects. We walk through the different aspects of a contextual project, describing the issues that need to be resolved, the different approaches that can work, and the principles which guide making a choice. We use exercises to give participants the chance to plan aspects of their own projects, so they can do the thinking process themselves and raise any questions raised by their own situations.This tutorial is appropriate to anyone wishing to use field methods to gather customer data for their projects. Some familiarity with these methods is assumed.

A tool supporting capture and analysis of field research data using the contextual design methodology

Field research techniques generate large amounts of unstructured data about users: their work practice, attitudes, strategies, motivations, and so forth. Managing, organizing, communicating, and making sense of this complex and rich data is an ongoing problem for HCI researchers. InContext performs field research and design for its clients, so we have experienced these problems in our business. This presentation demonstrates the software tools we built to manage our own research and design projects, showing how such tools can support a heavily team-based process, and how they can enhance the human thought process inherent in research and design.

Contextual design: using customer work models to drive system design (abstract)

Models to Drive System Design Karen Holt.zblatt Hugh Beyer InContext Enterprises, Inc. 249 Ayer Rd. Harvard, MA 01451 telephone: (508) 772-0001 email: karen @acm.erg, beyer@ acm.org Field data gathering techniques such as Contextual Inquiry enable a design team to gather the detailed data they need, These techniques produce enormous amounts of information on how the customers of a system work. This creates a new problem—how to represent all this detail in a coherent, comprehensible form, which can be a suitable basis for design? An affinity diagram effectively shows the scope of the customer problem, but is less effective at capturing and coherently representing the details of how people work. Design teams need a way to organize this detail so they can use it within their own development process. In this tutorial we present the latest methods for representing detailed information about work practice and using these representations to drive system design. These methods have been adopted over the last few years by major product development and information systems organizations. We show how to represent the work of individual users, how to generalize these to describe a whole market or department, and how to use these to drive innovative design. We present both the representation methods and the process by which we build and use them, Participants receive extensive practice in the techniques and also in the team skills necessary to do this work as part of a design team. We show how these methods fit into the Contextual Design process, which gathers field data and uses it to drive design through a well-defined series of steps. The tutorial is particularly appropriate for those who have Permission to copy without fee all or part of this material is granted provided that the copies are not made or distributed for direct commercial advantage, the ACM copyright notice and the title of the publication and its date appear, and notice is given that copying is by permission of ACM. To copy otherwise, or to republish, requires a fee and/or specific permission. CHI Companion 95, Denver, Colorado, USA (

Traditional Contextual Design Models

The Traditional Contextual Design Models introduced with Contextual Design are still viable and offer insight, but we have found that we rarely use some of them. In this chapter we discuss the Traditional Models that we do use regularly and their variants: The Sequence Model; the Decision Point Model, derived from the Cultural Model; the Physical Model; and Personas.

Validating the Design

Testing is an important part of any products development process, and its generally accepted that the sooner problems are found, the less it costs to fix them. Rough paper prototypes of the product design test the structure and user interface ideas before anything is committed to code. Paper prototypes, now a well-known, documented practice, support continuous iteration of the new product, keeping it true to the user and giving designers a data-based way of resolving disagreements. In prototyping sessions, users and designers redesign the mockup together to better fit the users activities. In Contextual Design we use a combination of paper mockups, online mockups, and early versions of running code to get the right kind of feedback at each stage in the process. In this chapter we introduce how to build a mockup, run a paper prototype interview, interpret the data, and update the design for the next round of testing.