Contextual Design: Defining Customer-Centered Systems (Interactive Technologies)

This book introduces a customer-centered approach to business by showing how data gathered from people while they work can drive the definition of a product or process while supporting the needs of teams and their organizations. This is a practical, hands-on guide for anyone trying to design systems that reflect the way customers want to do their work. The authors developed Contextual Design, the method discussed here, through their work with teams struggling to design products and internal systems. In this book, you'll find the underlying principles of the method and how to apply them to different problems, constraints, and organizational situations.

Contextual Design enables you to

+ gather detailed data about how people work and use systems

+ develop a coherent picture of a whole customer population

+ generate systems designs from a knowledge of customer work

+ diagram a set of existing systems, showing their relationships, inconsistencies, redundancies, and omissions

There's certainly no shortage of software design methods: most demand total allegiance, and many claim to be the only true way to delivering useful and maintainable software systems in a timely manner. Contextual Design describes another worthwhile software engineering method, one that places the user (or customer) at the forefront of the software design process from beginning to end. This method seems to be a particularly worthwhile addition to the literature.

Contextual Design begins with contextual inquiry, where software developers interview users and attempt to understand the way they work. Such "customer empathy" is central to the Contextual Design process and a total understanding of "work" within organizations is the mantra here. The book describes how, later in the process, software developers step back from the user data and do an "affinity," which is an overall analysis of hundreds (or even thousands) of individual facts. Contextual Design then explains the additional steps required to build systems using this method, including building models for flow, sequence, and artifacts, and establishing the cultural and the physical environments for a system. After getting an overview, developers consolidate these initial models, get more user input, and then design user interfaces.

This book, written in a clear, informal style without excessive jargon, reads very much like a book on business motivation. Various practitioners of Contextual Design offer short testimonials on the software design method.

The book is as described by the seller, but there where shipping mishandling and shipping took to long.

I will review this product from its material standpoint and not from an implementation standpoint. The book was part of a class I took in Carnegie Mellon. It makes for a fascinating read. Some of the topics are excellent food for thought for human/user centric design of software products. The class assignments involved mock implementations of the concepts described in the book which was fun.

Coming from an embedded world, I haven't had a chance to implement these ideas in my day to day work but if I ever work on a user centric product, I hope to try some of the ideas.

Good read.

The authors aren't really suggesting anything new. If you can do KJ analysis, you pretty much have this methodology nailed down. The book details a framework within which to assess what can be learned through observation and contextual inquiry (shadowing). The presentation can be somewhat redundant.

While I recommend contextual inquiry to analysts as it is presented here, I most certainly wouldn't recommend their ensuiong design process. It has many holes and there are better already-existing methods to complete the design process.

If you've got a memory like a gold fish this might be a great book. For others this book is likely to be repetative to the extreme. Half of the pages could easily be cut out. The same message gets repeated over and over again. Many of the ideas are great but.. for many people out there time is a limiting factor, thats my largest issue with both the book and the method in general.

This book provided a method to gather requirement efficiently but the rest of the method should be revised.