Contextual Design Pt. I

Contextual Design is a user-centered design process and a customer insight technique. It works for designing everything from consumer goods to cars to the Web. But before I get ahead of myself, let’s start from the beginning.

The Origin of Contextual Design

The challenge of innovative product design is in figuring out what we should be building so that somebody actually wants it.

When a user approaches your product, they bring with them their life experiences, the way they think about their activity, the habits they have from past technology, and their experiences of all the technology they have, particularly their mobile device.

When you build a product, you build in your assumptions about what a product should be. You build in your assumptions about what the user’s life is, their activity, what the user thinks, their concepts. And you build in your assumptions about the best way to put together a user interface or product.

The big question is what happens when the user experience hits your product assumptions? Does your product enliven, delight and transform the work of the user? Or does your product irritate or annoy them? The goal is to understand the optimum match between the way the user works and between the way the product works. If you merely do an exact match, duplicating what they can already do on paper, then you haven’t provided any value. So what you’re looking for is how to apply technology in a way that truly transforms the user’s world without annoying them.

If this is the real problem of product design, then you better understand what’s going on in the life of the user and you better have a process that helps you figure out how to do requirements and design before you start coding. This is the origin of contextual design.

Contextual design has eight steps that help you get from a deep understanding of the user all the way to the correct user interface. The first half of CD is about going out into the field and talking with people about what they do so you can understand what’s happening in their life and then using that data to generate product concepts. However, once you have an idea, even if it’s coming from being immersed in user data, it doesn’t mean that you know how to put it together. The second half of CD does detailed design and helps you figure out exactly what you should be putting together. Then you take it out into the field again to iterate multiple times with the user. That way you know you’re shipping something they want and like. In this post, I’ll cover the first four steps.

The 8 Steps of Contextual Design

1. Contextual Inquiry

The first and most important step is contextual inquiry. It is a two-hour, one-on-one field interview in the world of the user. You go out into the field and talk with people about what they do, where and while they’re doing it. This means you don’t video tape it and go home and figure it out later. You want to understand all the low-level details from the point of view of the person who is doing the activity that you’re trying to support.

At the very center of understanding what’s going on with people is the recognition that you’re not the user, even if you used to do this kind of work. You’ve gone over to the dark side of making technology. So if you want to understand what’s really happening, you have to get out there and see what they’re doing. Not only with your product, but with competitors products, with Post-its, when they’re interrupted, when they take a break, who they talk to walking down the hall and when they use Google instead of you.

The challenge with people is that they know everything about what they do, they just can’t tell us. They don’t spend their lives watching themselves do their activity. When you come in with your questionnaire and ask, “Tell me what you do,” ready to write, they’ll say something. But if you’re there watching them, you’ll see what they really do in the moment and be able to ask, “Hey, I just saw you do that. What do you think was happening?”

2. Interpretation Session

In the interpretation session, your team — which might consist of marketing, product developers, developers, user designers, and user experience people — will gather and whomever did the interview will tell the story of what happened, blow by blow. The entire team will capture key issues as well as model the work in order to look at the structure.

There are five classic contextual design models that can be used to characterize the activities of people:

The Sequence Model — Shows tasks done
The Flow Model — Shows communication and coordination
The Physical Model — Shows environmental layout
The Cultural Model — Shows expectations, policies and values
The Artifact Model — Shows physical objects used

All of the models represent different points of view on the user’s world. Each one is designed to make researchers think about a certain aspect.

3. Work Models and Affinity

Let’s say you and your team spoke to 15 people. Together, you probably have about 1000 Post-its and a slew of models. How can we see the big picture? We need a way to see the market and immerse ourselves in the experience of the user yet again.

In this step, we consolidate the data into the Affinity Diagram. Perhaps we make personas. The world of the user is now represented structurally so we can see what’s going on before we invent.

Next, grab a Post-it, ‘walk the data,’ and ask, “If this is what’s going on, what should we do?” The data helps stimulate new ways of thinking, which leads us to the next step.

4. Visioning

The beginning of ideation and new product concepts starts with walking the data and thinking of design ideas as a team. It’s brain prep.

In visioning, we don’t start listing features, look at the back of the box of competitors or pick the ‘best’ subset of your enhancement database. Having immersed ourselves in the world of the user, we’re going to now tell the story of what the new world will be like. If we introduce new technology to enhance, change and delight the user so they can do things better than before — or do things they never imagined — we’re going to invent a new human technical system.

You might do multiple visions and a (+) / ( — ) exercise, noting what works and what doesn’t. You’ll keep the things that work, fix the things that don’t work, and then consolidate the visions, deciding on what you believe in as a team. Next, you will break them up into different product concepts and this will be your guiding light going forward.

In Part II, I’ll explain how to use all of these concepts and actually abstract system and product requirements out of them.

***If you liked what you read here, you might be interested in my two-day workshop on Contextual Design in March 2017 at Betahaus in Berlin. Click here to read more about it and sign up! http://bit.ly/2hLOd57***