Contextual design: using customer work models to drive systems design

ABSTRACT

Field data gathering techniques such as Contextual Inquiry enable a design team to gather the detailed data they need. These techniques produce enormous amounts of information on how the customers of a system work. This creates a new problem---how to represent all this detail in a coherent, comprehensible form, which can be a suitable basis for design. An affinity diagram effectively shows the scope of the customer problem, but is less effective at capturing and coherently representing the details of how people work. Design teams need a way to organize this detail so they can use it in their own development process.In this tutorial we present our latest methods for representing detailed information about work practice and using these representations to drive system design. These methods have been adopted over the last few years by major product development and information systems organizations. We show how to represent the work of individual users in models, how to generalize these to describe a whole market or department, and how to use these to drive innovative design. We present the process by which we build and use the models and practice key steps. We show how these methods fit into the overall design process, and summarize Contextual Design, which gathers field data and uses it to drive design through a well-defined series of steps.The tutorial is appropriate for those who have used field techniques, especially Contextual Inquiry, and would like to put more structure on the process of using field data.We use shopping as our example of work practice throughout this tutorial, since shopping is simple and understood by everyone. We encourage participants to go grocery shopping shortly before the tutorial, and bring any shopping list they may have used, their store receipt, and a drawing of the store layout and their movement through it.

REFERENCES

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INDEX TERMS

Keywords:
analysis methods, customer-centered design, design techniques, domain analysis, ethnography, methodology, software engineering, task analysis, team design, usability engineering, user models, user studies work analysis, work modeling