InContext Team

We use Contextual Design to define innovative, customer-centered product concepts, hardware/software solutions, business systems, websites, and consumer goods. Our field data provides rich market characterizations and personas to help you understand the needs of your user population. Our design process ensures that your user interface designs and overall user experience is designed with customer data. And, we deliver training services in our Contextual Design methodology for your teams.

The Contextual Design methodology, developed by Karen Holtzblatt and Hugh Beyer, is a customer-centered design process which uses extensive field data as the foundation for understanding users’ needs, tasks, intents, and processes in order to design products that meet both users’ and business’ needs.

Karen and Hugh founded InContext in 1992. Since that time, we have worked with leaders and startups from a range of industries, including technology, telecommunications, publishing, medical devices, and consumer goods. Our clients include Autodesk, Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, Medtronic, Nokia, SAP, Wolters Kluwer and others.

We have been a major player in moving the high-tech industry from engineering-driven to customer-centered design for all types of products and technologies. Our first book, Contextual Design: Defining Customer-Centered Systems, has received 5-star reviews from Amazon.com readers and is used in design and human-computer interaction (HCI) curricula at universities and conferences throughout the world. Our second book, Rapid Contextual Design, is quickly gaining praise throughout the design community.

Giving Back

Since its inception, InContext has donated a percentage of our income to YouthBuild USA, an organization that empowers inner city youth through a combination of education and training in the construction industry. It’s a powerful, effective program—one we’re proud to support.