Tutorial 24

Contextual Design: Using Customer Work Models to Drive System Design

Karen Holtzblatt, Hugh Beyer, InContext Enterprises, Inc.

Monday, May 8

Objective

Participants will learn (1) work modeling techniques that represent customers' work practices, (2) how to construct a single representation of a system's users, whether the user population consists of a single department or a market of millions, (3) techniques for generating ground-breaking innovations from close inspection of customer data, (4) how to drive design conversations based on an understanding of the customer data, and (5) how to construct new definitions of work practice, showing how innovations will affect actual work.

Content

Participants will have the opportunity to practice every major technique that is presented. Actual customer data are used in the class exercises.

Audience

This introductory-level tutorial is for anyone interested in customer-centered design, requirements analysis, or tailoring products and systems to people's work. This tutorial is of interest to human factors professionals, engineers, designers, and managers. It is most valuable to persons with prior experience with customer field interviews.

Presentation

Participatory lecture, exercises

Instructors

Karen Holtzblatt and Hugh Beyer are the developers of Contextual Design, a customer-centered design process extending the Contextual Inquiry (CI) data gathering technique. Dr. Holtzblatt originated the CI approach to field data collection and has pioneered the introduction of this technique into working engineering teams. Hugh Beyer has worked in the industry as a programmer, architect, and consultant for twelve years. Holtzblatt and Beyer are co-founders of InContext Enterprises, Inc., a firm which works with companies such as Microsoft and WordPerfect, coaching teams to design products, product strategies, and information systems from customer data.

Keith Instone / instone@acm.org / 95-01-05