Tutorial: 25. Contextual Design: Using Customer Work Models to Drive Systems Design

Karen Holtzblatt, InContext Enterprises; Hugh Beyer, InContext Enterprises

Benefits
You will learn how to develop work models for representing data from field studies in a form that is suitable for system design.

Origins
This is an update of a highly rated tutorial from CHI 95, CHI 96 and CHI 97.

Features

• contextual influence on people in their work environments
• different types of work modeling techniques for representing users' tasks, environments, communication paths and organizational culture
• how to drive design from work models
• consolidating work models to reveal common structure, work strategies, intents and concepts
• techniques to generate, evaluate and iterate innovative designs from work models

Audience
Anyone interested in customer-centered design, requirements analysis or tailoring products and systems to people's work. Especially valuable for those who have experience collecting field data about users.

Presentation
Lectures, video, demonstrations and hands-on exercises.

Instructors
The instructors developed Contextual Design, a customer-centered design process that extends the contextual inquiry data gathering technique. Dr. Holtzblatt originated the Contextual Inquiry approach to field data collection and pioneered its introduction into working engineering teams. She has used customer-centered processes to design and evaluate software, hardware and business processes. Hugh Beyer has worked in the industry as programmer, architect and consultant. He has designed and developed object-oriented repositories and integrated CASE systems, and has developed processes for using customer data to drive object-oriented design.

Related Tutorials

• 10. Structured Observation: Practical Methods for Understanding Users and their Work in Context (Sunday)
• 17. Getting Started on a Contextual Project (Sunday afternoon)
• 32. Conceptual Design: From User Requirements to User Interface (Monday morning)