InContext Works with Companies to Design Highly Interactive Work Tools with Contextual Design

InContext has been using Contextual Design (CDs) techniques to design highly interactive software tools since literally before CD’s formal inception. This work first started in the 1980s at Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) and continues today.

Challenge

Highly interactive tools such as Integrated Development Environments (IDEs), productivity support tools (such as Microsoft® Office), and creation tools (such as Adobe® Photoshop®) pose special challenges. Users live in these tools for long periods to get their primary work tasks done. They want to focus on the content of their task — the tool should become invisible to them just as a pen is invisible to a writer. How can designers ensure the fit between tool and user is so seamless that the tool never intrudes on the user’s thought process?

EVE text editor

DEC had a basic text editor that was powerful technically, but very difficult to use. DEC wanted an editor that people could pick up without training and use without breaking their work flow. Karen Holtzblatt's first Contextual Inquiry project was an evaluation of this product to improve its use. The new version quickly gained an enthusiastic and loyal following.

Cohesion IDE

DEC had a number of powerful software development tools, supporting developers as they specified, coded, tested, and managed the configuration of their software. Karen Holtzblatt worked with these teams individually using Contextual Inquiry to understand the needs and make recommendations for improvements to the individual tools. But data from these projects revealed that developers needed a more integrated experience. The initial work suggested a new market direction for DEC's tool suite. This was unfamiliar territory for DEC and at the time there were few successful IDEs on the market to copy. InContext’s founders developed Contextual Design to determine the needs of developers and invent an IDE that brought together DEC’s existing tools into a coherent environment.

Microsoft Office

In the mid-90s Microsoft had a set of productivity tools (Outlook, Word, Excel, etc.) with limited integration between them. People called Microsoft Office "three tools in a box." Microsoft was clear that it wanted to integrate their tools, but wasn’t sure what aspects of integration were important. Furthermore, Microsoft wanted to deliver personal-organization features with calendars and to-do lists, but was unsure how this functionality fit with existing tools.

Through Contextual Design, InContext worked with Microsoft Program Management to understand the Office market and users’ work practice. We used techniques such as the User Environment Design to represent the whole integrated solution, place new function where it fit best, and determine product boundaries. This enabled Microsoft to rationalize its development plans and ship the industry-leading office environment.

Analytic Lab Support Environment

HP (now Agilent) was the industry leader in devices and tools supporting analytical labs. But the industry was moving to integrated information management environments for laboratories with tracking of substances, procedures, tests, and machines — all the information a labneeds to keep running. HP needed to integrate its devices into such an environment or fall behind the market. The HP team called on InContext to help it study their market and design an integrated system. From this project HP developed a clear development strategy for an integrated laboratory system.

Call Center Support

Apropos is one of the main providers of call center support systems — the systems that ensure telephone calls are routed to a free agent who can deal with the call. As new support technologies emerged — email, websites, and chat—and as telecommuting became more important to call centers, Apropos’s market was changing in ways that threatened to make their technology obsolete. Apropos called in InContext to help it study the market changes and design solutions which would reposition its systems to support the new work practices. Through Contextual Design, InContext helped Apropos produce a vision for product extensions that seamlessly integrated the new support technologies into its product architecture.

Delivering Results

InContext's long history of working with tools — whether text based, graphical, or targeted to developers and IT pros — gives us the background and context necessary to understand the expectations, temperament, and work style of users dependent on tools to be productive no matter what their industry. Our designers have the depth of knowledge necessary to design the highly interactive interfaces such tools require. Our customer-centered design process plus the depth of our experience is a powerful combination for innovative tool development.