How Can Contextual Design Be Integrated
Designing contextually ensures that the product fits the user’s world intuitively. It is about seeing the product as the user sees it, and ensuring that it works with existing systems and processes. This allows developers and UI specialists to prioritize features, to identify ways of pacifying pain points in the system, and to provide value-added functionality that extends and expands the software into other areas.
The Contextual Design methodology is based on anthropology and psychology, developed by Karen Holtzblatt and Hugh Beyer in the 1980’s at Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). It became a key part of HCI practice over the years that followed, moving from heretic to accepted practice within the field.
Contextual Design is an observational process; it requires a team that is dedicated to it and committed to doing it well. The core team should be a mix of people with the right skills and personality types to work together — close enough to the users to understand their workflows, habits, motivations, and problems, but far enough from them to be able to offer a fresh perspective. The core team should be a group of full time employees that dedicate themselves to the project, and ideally are compensated primarily for this effort. They may have helpers for things like setting up appointments with users, getting conference rooms, and the like, but the core team is the team who owns and drives the project.
How Can Contextual Design Be Integrated With Other Design Methodologies?
Contextual interviews are structured observations that take place in the users’ real environment and real work. The interviewer observes the users as they perform their work, and prompts them with questions about their workflows and the challenges they face. The interviewer also records the behavior they observe in the form of a Contextual Design model.
Models are graphical representations of the workflow and experience captured during Contextual Design observations. Using a wide variety of models, a team can synthesize and organize the data gathered through Contextual Inquiry, enabling them to make data-driven design decisions.
A consolidated sequence model, for example, reveals the steps of the workflow by color coding their intents and breakdowns. A Day-in-the-Life model provides a broad view of the life context of the workflow, and backs up the sequence models with details of the interactions in those moments.
The synthesis that is possible through the use of multiple models gives design teams an effective way to handle huge amounts of qualitative data, which aren’t amenable to reductive statistical techniques. It helps them see the overall structure of a practice and the underlying experiences, avoiding information overload while allowing teams to focus on the specific areas that will drive their feature development efforts.