I’ve attended two conferences in the last three weeks—Jared Spool’s UX Immersions conference, and CHI 2012, the primary computer-human interaction conference. UX Immersions was the smaller conference, focusing this year on the Agile/UX interface and on design for mobile devices. It was a great group of very focused people and, as it was run by Jared’s [...]
Our Perspective: Blog
Going into the Field is Really the Only Way
by Kelley Wagg
Tuesday, March 20th, 2012Remembering James Q. Wilson and how he used field research to gain insights into real problems.
Announcing Interactions Article: What Makes Things Cool?
by Karen Holtzblatt
Tuesday, December 6th, 2011I’m pleased to announce my article on “What Makes Things Cool?” has just been published in the November issue of Interactions. See the front cover of your copy of Interactions or buy a copy of the PDF here. Any time that a new platform emerges, it calls for new design principles and techniques to truly [...]
General Motors Takes a CUE from Customers
by Larry Marturano
Tuesday, November 8th, 2011It’s always exciting for us to see what we call practical innovation in action—companies leveraging existing and emerging technologies with their own unique skills and capabilities. So it was exciting to see General Motors announce their next generation driver experience this month.
The Limits of Iterative Development
by Hugh Beyer
Friday, October 21st, 2011One of the ongoing questions in Agile development is whether and how much up-front design needs to be done. This is my perspective.
Agile 2011
by Hugh Beyer
Friday, August 19th, 2011I’m back from Agile 2011. Another week spent in one of the most beautiful parts of America, with sunny days in the 70’s—spent in windowless, air-conditioned rooms with a bunch of computer geeks. I wouldn’t have had it any other way. The Agile conference continues to be one of the more exciting conferences around, and [...]
Trust the Process
by Larry Marturano
Friday, July 15th, 2011“This is never going to work. I don’t get it. Why are we doing this?” “Don’t worry, Cody.” I’m teaching one of my 16-year-old son’s friends how to do an affinity analysis on some data he’d collected for a high school “critical thinking” project. Sometimes I’m not sure how I get myself into these things. [...]
Boston MiniUPA Conference Redux – May, 2011
by Traci Lepore
Wednesday, June 22nd, 2011Boston MiniUPA isn’t mini anymore, but it’s still good.
CHI 2011: The Design of Cool
by Karen Holtzblatt
Thursday, May 26th, 2011CHI 2011 was a whirlwind of classes and papers and people—and of course, great views of the mountains! But for me, the most exciting thing was to debut our new concepts articulating the factors behind people’s experience of “cool.”
CHI2011: Understanding Our Interaction Design History
by David Rondeau
Thursday, May 26th, 2011As interaction design professionals, we need to understand the history of our field and pay attention to how it has changed. The basic interaction design principles that we introduced in the CHI course—prominence, relationship, flow, clarity, simplicity and consistency—have remained the same, but the way we apply those principles changes as our technology changes. This is because each new technology creates new opportunities and new constraints for interaction design.
CHI2011: Agile at CHI
by Hugh Beyer
Thursday, May 26th, 2011Moving the industry to an effective integration of Agile development with UX and the larger product development practice is going to take a lot more education, promotion, and repetition of the basic message: giving the UX designers their rightful place at the Agile table.
Fighting Complacency
by Kelley Wagg
Tuesday, May 17th, 2011“Complacence inertia.” I have seen it throughout my career. It’s natural to assume you understand your market and your customers because you talk to them in various forums, but it lulls us into complacence.
Phase 0
by Hugh Beyer
Thursday, April 14th, 2011Has any Agile project ever kicked off without a Phase 0? I don’t think so. But if you’ve been working happily without a Phase 0, I’d like to hear about it.
Nouns and Verbs
by Larry Marturano
Monday, April 4th, 2011When you think of a technology or a product as a noun, you concentrate on what it is, its object-ness. But a verb is something different. When you think of a technology or product as a verb, you think about what it can do for people. And that’s an important difference for the success of the product.
Digital Publishing: A view from the trenches
by Shelley Wood
Wednesday, March 16th, 2011It’s a huge challenge for a print publishing company to transform into a technology company. Here are some of the pitfalls.
Being cool isn’t always about being Apple
by Traci Lepore
Thursday, March 3rd, 2011Celebrating good design, wherever we find it
How Do You Overcome Requirements Blind Spots?
by Dave Flotree
Tuesday, February 22nd, 2011This company’s confidence in their original business plan and product concept was so great that it had blinded them to customer realities. The train had already left the station before they really knew customer needs.
Innovation Comes from Watching Users
by Kelley Wagg
Wednesday, February 16th, 2011GM’s experience studying drivers shows that a close analysis of user behavior can indeed lead to innovation.
Finding Design Opportunity in Connections
by David Rondeau
Monday, February 7th, 2011Designers are sometimes myopic. (Before you get defensive, you should know I’ve been designing for 20 years and I still include myself in that statement.) As designers, we tend to focus on our product but not the larger ecosystem in which it exists—even though almost everything we design is connected to other products or services. [...]
The Responsibility of Design
by Karen Holtzblatt
Wednesday, December 15th, 2010Do you ever get “the clutch”? You know what I mean—that feeling in your chest that THIS feature MUST be shipped or the product will FAIL. When a team member can’t let go of their idea no matter what the data from the customer, the reality of shipping, or the difficulty of the code, we [...]
Seduced by a Keyboard
by Hugh Beyer
Tuesday, December 7th, 2010Here’s the story: I’m at a meeting hosted by another company. A bunch of us walk into their team room, talking, and I wander over to the table in the center of the room and touch the keyboard laying there. Then I start swearing. I swore because Apple did it again. The keyboard was one [...]
Agile’s Just a Fad
by Hugh Beyer
Wednesday, November 17th, 2010“Agile is just a fad.” Somebody said that to me the other day, and I’m sure you’ve heard the same if you’re involved in Agile development at all. I had the usual half-defensive, half-annoyed reaction one has when on the receiving end of such a remark. But then I started to mull over the question. [...]
Next of Kin
by Larry Marturano
Wednesday, October 27th, 2010The Microsoft Kin was launched in mid-April—a social networking optimized phone aimed squarely and explicitly at teens and pre-teens. But by June it was dead. Did user research ironically help kill the Kin?
Changing Minds is Hard Work
by Hugh Beyer
Monday, October 4th, 2010I’ve been telling people for years that thinking is hard work. At the end of a day building an affinity when everyone’s brain is completely fried even though all they’ve done for the day is stick Post-its on the wall—“See, thinking is hard work!” I say with a chipper smile, and everybody hates me. This [...]
Is Analytics the Answer?
by Larry Marturano
Monday, August 30th, 2010It’s been fascinating over the last several years to watch the big hairy technology battle of our age play out—Google versus Apple. This is a clash of ideologies in how they approach design.
The Agile 2010 Conference: Agile Grows Up
by Hugh Beyer
Wednesday, August 18th, 2010I’m on my way back from Agile 2010, the main industry conference on Agile methods and tools. If I had to choose one theme for the conference, it would be something like “Agile Grows Up”—not only has Agile become mainstream, but the community is starting to recognize and tackle the real issues of doing development in organizations.
Does Contextual Inquiry Interviewing Only Work in the US?
by Shelley Wood
Monday, August 9th, 2010People sometimes challenge me (politely) with reasons why Contextual Inquiry (CI) interviews can’t work with their specific industry or user population. Usually I go into some variation of my standard explanation with examples related to their situation to illustrate how CI does work, and why. But then the participants in a Contextual Design workshop in [...]
InContext Does Agile
by Hugh Beyer
Monday, August 2nd, 2010There’s a fair backlog of news from the Agile world that I want to share with folks. We’ve been involved in working with Agile teams, and working out the relationship between Agile methods and user-centered design for some years now. Here are our latest activities.
Where is Nokia?
by Karen Holtzblatt
Tuesday, July 27th, 2010I walked out of Verizon yesterday having just ordered the Motorola Droid X. I was pretty excited to try it out, having waited for Verizon to get something I wanted. “You know what was conspicuously missing?” my husband said as we walked out of the store. “Nokia!” we said together. Where is Nokia in the [...]
Why Developers Don’t Think Systemically
by Hugh Beyer
Monday, July 12th, 2010BJ Clark over at Marked as Pertinent has an interesting post on who should do acceptance testing. He starts there, but he spends most of the post on the really interesting question, which is the role of the Interaction Designer (ID). His claim, which I agree with, is that the ID is responsible for the [...]
Do we need a CQ – a creative intelligence measure?
by Kelley Wagg
Friday, June 18th, 2010A recent discussion by Bruce Nussbaum (BusinessWeek) suggests the need for identifying the creative capability of individuals and organizations. This concept got me thinking about creativity and how or even IF we could or should measure such a thing. I think the motivation behind the concept of creative intelligence is to foster the generation of [...]
How Blink Justifies Doing Field Interviews
by Shelley Wood
Wednesday, June 2nd, 2010Malcolm Gladwell’s stories support doing observational user research in the field, show why it matters, and reveal how to convince management to let you do it. If you are fighting to justify going out to observe your customers in the field instead of doing traditional interviews—here’s some ammunition from a credible source not connected to the technology community.
Agile development at CHI
by Hugh Beyer
Tuesday, May 4th, 2010I attended CHI 2010 week before last and it was interesting and insightful as usual. There were lots of great ideas, interaction paradigms and insightful research being presented. But one topic was not much addressed by official conference sessions, but was common in the hallway conversations: how to deal with agile software development. I go [...]
CHI2010: Understanding Cool SIG
by Karen Holtzblatt
Friday, April 30th, 2010We had a wonderful time at our SIG on Understanding Cool this year at CHI 2010. Here at InContext we are taking up the challenge of understanding the experience of “cool” in the context of people’s lives and across people’s life cycle. Our advanced research is looking at people from high school through 60 to [...]
CHI 2010: A Celebration of the Value of Field Data
by Karen Holtzblatt
Thursday, April 29th, 2010The really impressive thing in this year’s CHI is that our community has recognized the value of field data for the purpose of design. Understanding the details of people’s lives has become mainstream, central to the design process. This is real industry change and we are celebrating it.
Win a Free Copy of “Contextual Design”
by Wendy Fritzke
Monday, April 12th, 2010We’re running a contest on Twitter that we hope you’ll find fun. Here’s what you need to do: Tweet about what you think is the single most helpful design principle. If you had to choose just one principle that you could get all those non-designer folks out there who are creating websites that are impossible [...]
Come See Us at CHI
by Kelley Wagg
Wednesday, April 7th, 2010We’re looking forward to attending the CHI 2010 conference next week and have a variety of exciting things planned. First, we’ll be leading a SIG, “Understanding Cool,” on Monday, April 12th, from 2:30-4:00. In this session, we’ll be discussing the challenges of designing “cool” products and services. We’ll lead discussions with participants to come up [...]
Front End Zen
by Larry Marturano
Tuesday, March 16th, 2010How do you deal with the fact that your desire to measure innovation can kill it? Great innovation is more Buddha than Black-Scholes. Find your innovation Zen.
Designing Services
by Hugh Beyer
Wednesday, February 24th, 2010The fun thing about being a consultant is that you get to work with lots of different teams and lots of different companies. And that means you get to work on very different types of problems. With that in mind, let me tell you about my week. I was coaching a firm that provides HR [...]
Executing in the Fuzzy Front End
by Larry Marturano
Sunday, February 21st, 2010It’s strange how the concept of execution gets linked almost solely with operations. What would happen if we applied “execution” to the “fuzziness” of development’s front end?
InContext is Hiring
by Larry Marturano
Friday, February 5th, 2010InContext Design is looking for energetic and talented Interaction Designers and User Researchers — we call them “Work Practice Designers” — for our locations in Boston and Chicago.
A Long Term Affair
by Kelley Wagg
Friday, December 18th, 2009I’ve used numerous marketing processes and many development lifecycles during my career but it wasn’t until I encountered Contextual Design that I fell in love.
Organizational Empathy
by Larry Marturano
Monday, November 2nd, 2009In a previous post, I talked about what I called “disciplinary empathy” – the ability to get out of one’s acculturated box and see problems from the point of view of other peoples’ expertise and training. I made the observation that people I’ve run across with high disciplinary empathy are remarkably innovative in teams. Because [...]
Connectivity Week 2009
by Karen Holtzblatt
Tuesday, September 29th, 2009Energy utilities are ready to cross over the boundary of the energy meter and into your life. At Connectivity Week I had the pleasure of participating on one of their keynote panels. Here are some thoughts about the state of our utilities and how things are evolving.
Creativity from the Ground Up
by Larry Marturano
Friday, August 28th, 2009Every so often, I’m faced with the realization that something I really believe isn’t so. There’s that momentary sense of profound disorientation that forces me to stop and really think—and adjust myself to a new reality. Sure, that whole Easter Bunny realization was a downer, but over the years I’ve come to really like this [...]
Essential Agile
by Hugh Beyer
Friday, August 14th, 2009The essential core of agile is fast iterations tested with user feedback. Everything else is there to make that core work better, faster, or in a more organized way. Throw away everything else if you must but don’t trade off this core. Let me explain why…
T-Shaped Teams
by Larry Marturano
Monday, August 3rd, 2009I heard once that our biggest mistakes buy us our most meaningful insights. Not that it’s very fun, mind you. But it’s true, we do learn from our mistakes. And for those of us who are not airline pilots or surgeons, they can be positive, career-changing insights. When I was first putting teams together as [...]
Innovation is Easy
by Hugh Beyer
Sunday, July 26th, 2009People usually think that coming up with an innovative idea is the hard part. But as I see it, that’s the easy part. The hard part is actually acting on the innovation.
Sustainable Brands 2009
by Dave Flotree
Tuesday, July 21st, 2009For sustainability advocates, the “live within our means” trend is looking much better than during the past couple decades. People are consuming less and more carefully. But will the people who are conserving and sacrificing now want to keep that up once the recession is over?
Journey to the Center of the Human Psyche
by Karen Holtzblatt
Friday, July 17th, 2009Reading after a show or movie is not just “being in the know” or “being part of a community”. It’s not just about having something to talk to others about. It’s also about our reluctance to let go of something that is part of our lives no longer—it is about re-experiencing as a human driver.
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