Contextual Design
Whether you are developing software that solves a business problem, improves a current process, or explores a new domain to inform future development work, it’s essential to have a clear understanding of users’ real work activities and mental models. Traditional research techniques like surveys and usability testing can provide only limited insight, but Contextual Design can give you the data you need to develop a solution that will work for your target user.
In Versions Contextual Design (CD), a rigorously structured ethnographic field study methodology developed by Hugh Beyer and Karen Holtzblatt, teams gather and analyze fieldwork data to create a customer-centered product – typically software. The method incorporates a variety of qualitative and quantitative data collection techniques, including contextual inquiry interviews and work modeling. This highly effective and scalable approach has been used successfully for the design of computer information systems, hardware and software.
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To identify and capture work activities, teams conduct in-person interviews with participants, observe them working in their environment, and then translate the fieldwork data into meaningful designs for their products. The interviews can include open-ended questions, structured dialogs, and the use of prompts to guide the flow of the interview. Affinity mapping helps the team find common themes in the interview data, and workshops help the team understand the meaning of the data in terms of work flows, mental models, and routines.
How to Identify and Capture Work Activities in Contextual Design
The process culminates in the creation of a work model, a set of annotated photos or drawings that illustrate how people complete routine tasks. This work model reveals the structure, flow and timing of tasks as well as cultural constraints that impact the user’s performance. It could be a physical model of an office or home, or an artifact model that includes paper documents, software screens, and even the actual objects that are manipulated or passed during the process.
To help the team envision their solution, the CD process also calls for building personas from the detailed field data gathered. These personas can be used to guide visioning, to segment the market by practice rather than typical demographics, for branding and prioritization, and for bringing users and their needs to life for developers.
Throughout Agile development proper, the CD tools and techniques continue to support the team in meeting their goals of early customer involvement, prioritization, and validation of work through paper prototype iterations. In fact, a key benefit of CD is that the knowledge gained in the earlier stages of the project can be transferred to the Agile team, so it has a head start on the work to be done. This ensures that the user stories being prioritized and written during Agile iterations are based on real needs. This is the key to a successful, productive, and customer-centered workflow. Attempts to substitute stakeholders or internal product owners for the customer voice only serve to hinder this workflow.