Posts Tagged ‘Contextual Design’

Trust the Process

by Larry Marturano

“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. [...]

Simple Methods for Reliable User Involvement

by Hugh Beyer

Hugh will be presenting at the Agile conference again this year, talking about basic techniques for getting users involved in your Agile sprints. From the conference program: One of the difficult problems faced by an Agile team is that of getting reliable user input. Since Agile projects depend on minimal up-front planning and specification, user [...]

I’m in the user’s shoes, now what?

by Traci Lepore

How finding an empathetically user-centered perspective on design builds innovation Many of us talk about being user-centered, and most of us want to be user-centered designers. But what does that really mean? And how do you take the understanding you gain from user research and do something meaningful with it for an innovative outcome? In [...]

Fighting Complacency

by Kelley Wagg

“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

Has 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

When 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

It’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

Celebrating good design, wherever we find it

InContext at CHI 2011

by Karen Holtzblatt

InContext presents 3 sessions at CHI this year

The Role of the UX Professional on an Agile Team

by Hugh Beyer

Making compelling products and applications

Driving Innovation

by Kelley Wagg

The new GM gets intimate with customers. A case study.

How Do You Overcome Requirements Blind Spots?

by Dave Flotree

This 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

GM’s experience studying drivers shows that a close analysis of user behavior can indeed lead to innovation.

Changing Minds is Hard Work

by Hugh Beyer

I’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 [...]

Does Contextual Inquiry Interviewing Only Work in the US?

by Shelley Wood

People 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 [...]

Where is Nokia?

by Karen Holtzblatt

I 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 [...]

How Blink Justifies Doing Field Interviews

by Shelley Wood

Malcolm 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.

Designing Services

by Hugh Beyer

The 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 [...]

A Long Term Affair

by Kelley Wagg

I’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

In 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 [...]

Don’t Ask Your Customer

by Karen Holtzblatt

Don’t ask your customer what they need or want or like. People focus on doing their life not watching their life. So if you ask them outright, people can’t tell you what they do or what they want. It’s not part of their consciousness to understand their own life activities. We can offer you a better way.

Don’t Ask Your Customer—Use Contextual Inquiry

by Karen Holtzblatt

Every methodology invented for designing the right thing starts with gathering requirements. Requirements gathering is the single most difficult part of the process because if you don’t get it right, you don’t build the right thing—or the most desirable thing. Here’s why these popular methods fail, and what you can do instead to find out who your customers really are and what they need.

Creativity from the Ground Up

by Larry Marturano

Every 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 [...]

“Rapid Contextual Design” is Translated Into Korean

by Hugh Beyer

This hands-on guide for people who need practical direction on how to use the Contextual Design process and adapt it to tactical projects with tight timelines has now been translated into Korean. A Japanese version will be published in January 2010. These two translations are in response to the high interest in Contextual Design shown [...]

Hey! You’re Standing in My Space!

by Hugh Beyer

This year I made it to the CHI (Computer/Human Interaction) conference for the first time in a while. It was fun to see old friends and new research—lots of thought-provoking papers and some fun and cool technology. But it’s the keynote that really struck a chord with me. Judith Olson talked about body language and [...]

A Good Week

by Hugh Beyer

It’s been a good week. Some days you go home wondering what you accomplished; other days you feel like you really earned your keep. That’s the kind of week I had. Here’s the story.