Rapid Contextual Design

By Karen Holtzblatt, Jessamyn Burns Wendell, and Shelley Wood
Morgan Kaufmann Publishers; ISBN: 0123540518

This handbook introduces Rapid Contextual Design, a fast-paced, adaptive form of Contextual Design. It's a hands-on guide for anyone who needs practical direction on how to use the Contextual Design process and adapt it to tactical projects with tight timelines. Rapid Contextual Design provides detailed suggestions on structuring the project and customer interviews, conducting interviews, and running interpretation sessions. The handbook also walks you step-by-step through the consolidation process, along with visioning, storyboarding, and paper prototype interviewing.

Throughout the handbook there are actual examples from real projects run by InContext clients. Each chapter includes Tips and Do's and Don'ts, as well as guidance on what to think about and watch out for while running your project. The handbook also addresses how to fit the Contextual Design process into existing product development processes like RUP and XP and how to use Contextual Design data to create personas.

CDTools™ documentation and usage guidance is included in the handbook. CDTools™ is InContext's commercially available software application designed specifically to support customer-centered design. Throughout the book, you'll find instructions to use CDTools for tracking interviewed users, capturing interpretation sessions notes, putting your affinity diagram online, and publishing your affinity to a browser for sharing with others.

See complete details and some of the great initial reviews on Amazon.com.

Features

Praise for Rapid Contextual Design

"This book sets forth a detailed, flexible design plan that can be tailored to suit your needs. Whether you are a seasoned usability professional or a novice trying to develop your awareness of user-centered design, you should add this title to your bookshelf."

— Journal of the Society for Technical Communication, August 2005

"Here are those little gems of advice that a skilled mentor who peered over your shoulder would tell you. If you lack such a mentor, this book is the next best thing, explaining just what you need to do in a straightforward, easy-to-read, easy-to-understand manner."

— Don Norman, Nielsen Norman Group, Professor, Northwestern University, Author of Emotional Design

"The new how-to guide boosts the value of the original Contextual Design book by transforming a design method into pragmatic advices of how to run a Contextual Design project in your own environment."

— Joerg Beringer, Director, Strategic Product Design, SAP-AG

"A wise guide to interface design do's and don'ts, from people with experience. They create a new language for thinking about design processes, combining a compelling structured process with sufficient freedom for innovative excursions."

— Ben Shneiderman, Professor, University of Maryland

"Rapid Contextual Design provides a further step in innovation by offering detailed, practical advice on how to conduct successful research projects and fit the project to the need. My team welcomes these new advances and the flexibility they will provide when we conduct future projects using this method."

— Terry Austin, User Experience Group Manager, Microsoft

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Introduction
Chapter 2: Planning Your Rapid CD Project
Chapter 3: Planning Your Contextual Interviews
Chapter 4: The Contextual Inquiry Interview
Chapter 5: Contextual Interview Interpretation Session
Chapter 6: Work Modeling
Chapter 7: Consolidating Sequence Models
Chapter 8: Building an Affinity Diagram
Chapter 9: Using Contextual Data to Write Personas
Chapter 10: Walking the Affinity and Consolidated Sequences
Chapter 11: Visioning a New Way to Work
Chapter 12: Storyboarding
Chapter 13: Testing with Paper Prototypes
Chapter 14: Paper Prototype Interviews
Chapter 15: Rapid CD and Other Methodologies
Chapter 16: Issues of Organizational Adoption
Appendix: Suggested Supply Checklist