With Contextual Design, we provide innovation from a deep understanding of your customers and a proven process for transforming that knowledge into insightful, user-tested solutions.
Where does innovation come from?
People say innovation is about creating something totally new. So how can you generate requirements and design for something that has never been seen before by studying customers now?
The fact is that even “disruptive” inventions always respond to and transform some existing behavior or need. Technology moves quickly, but the core underlying human and business behaviors actually do not. Mobile phones address the need to connect, but that doesn‘t mean people didn’t communicate before mobile phones — or even telephones. Deeply understanding your customers’ current core needs and behaviors allows you to address them with future technologies, processes and solutions. And deeply understanding your employees’ real behavior and process ensures that your business changes make sense for the people and the business.
There is no magic bullet for creativity, but by bringing the key ingredients together, we make it easier for great ideas to emerge. Our visioning step steeps your team in the customer data, and leads them through a simple ideation process aimed at creating new product, service and process concepts.
Better requirements through validated innovation
Your customers can be your innovation partners — not by telling you what to build through feature requests, but by giving you early feedback on the concepts you create based on their needs, while it is easy and inexpensive to modify them.
Paper or quick online prototypes allow you to test your designs and solutions with the only people who matter — your customers — easily and quickly. What emerges over several rounds of iteration is a validated set of your most important requirements, based on actual customer behavior with real concepts. Validating content, interaction design, and information architecture ensures that you know what will succeed before you start to build.
Our User Environment Diagram and Living Specification capture these validated, prioritized requirements, the validated design and the structured customer data behind them. We help you have confidence that you’re building the right product in the best way.
Innovation for a wide range of applications
Using our Contextual Design process, we’ve worked with a wide range of clients and together created a broad variety of products and processes. We can do the same for you!
- Hardware and software products
- Business applications and systems
- Customer and enterprise facing web portals
- Consumer products