Rapid Contextual Design: A How-to Guide to Key Techniques for User-Centered Design (Interactive Technologies) - Softcover

Holtzblatt, Karen; Wendell, Jessamyn Burns; Wood, Shelley

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0123540518 ISBN 13: 9780123540515

Publisher: Morgan Kaufmann, 2004

Synopsis

Is it impossible to schedule enough time to include users in your design process? Is it difficult to incorporate elaborate user-centered design techniques into your own standard design practices? Do the resources needed seem overwhelming?

This handbook introduces Rapid CD, a fast-paced, adaptive form of Contextual Design. Rapid CD is a hands-on guide for anyone who needs practical guidance on how to use the Contextual Design process and adapt it to tactical projects with tight timelines and resources.

Rapid Contextual Design provides detailed suggestions on structuring the project and customer interviews, conducting interviews, and running interpretation sessions. The handbook walks you step-by-step through organizing the data so you can see your key issues, along with visioning new solutions, storyboarding to work out the details, and paper prototype interviewing to iterate the design―all with as little as a two-person team with only a few weeks to spare!

• Includes real project examples with actual customer data that illustrate how a CD project actually works
• Covers the entire scope of a project, from deciding on the number and type of interviews, to interview set up and analyzing collected data. Sample project schedules are also included for a variety of different types of projects
• Provides examples of how-to write affinity notes and affinity labels, build an affinity diagram, and step-by-step instructions for consolidating sequence models
• Shows how to use consolidated data to define a design within tight time frames with examples of visions, storyboards, and paper prototypes
• Introduces CDTools™, the first application designed to support customer-centered design

About this title

About the Author

Karen Holtzblatt is a co-founder of InContext Enterprises, Inc., a firm that works with companies, coaching teams to design products, product strategies, and information systems from customer data. Karen Holtzblatt developed the Contextual Inquiry field data gathering technique that forms the core of Contextual Design and is now taught and used world-wide.

From the Back Cover

Here are those little gems of advice that a skilled mentor who peered over your shoulder would tell you. If you lack such a mentor, this book is the next best thing, explaining just what you need to do in a straightforward, easy-to-read, easy-to-understand manner.

--Don Norman, Nielsen Norman group, Prof., Northwestern University,
Author of Emotional Design

The new how-to guide boosts the value of the original Contextual Design book by transforming a design method into pragmatic advice of how to run a Contextual Design project in your own environment.
--Joerg Beringer, Director, Strategic Product Design, SAP-AG

A wise guide to interface design do’s and don'ts, from people with experience. They create a new language for thinking about design processes, combining a compelling, structured process with sufficient freedom for innovative excursions.
--Ben Shneiderman, University of Maryland

Rapid Contextual Design provides a further step in innovation by providing detailed, practical advice on how to conduct successful research projects and to fit the project to the need. My team welcomes these new advances and the flexibility they will provide when we conduct future projects using this method.
Terry Austin, User Experience Group Manager, Microsoft

Is it impossible to schedule enough time to include users in your design process? Is it difficult to incorporate elaborate user-centered design techniques into your own standard design practices? Do the resources needed seem overwhelming?

This handbook introduces Rapid CD, a fast-paced, adaptive form of Contextual Design. Rapid CD is a hands-on guide for anyone who needs practical guidance on how to use the Contextual Design process and adapt it to tactical projects with tight timelines and resources.

Rapid Contextual Design provides detailed suggestions on structuring the project and customer interviews, conducting interviews, and running interpretation sessions. The handbook walks you step-by-step through organizing the data so you can see your key issues, along with visioning new solutions, storyboarding to work out the details, and paper prototype interviewing to iterate the design―all with as little as a two-person team with only a few weeks to spare!

Features:

• Includes real project examples with actual customer data that illustrate how a CD project actually works
• Covers the entire scope of a project, from deciding on the number and type of interviews, to interview set-up and analyzing collected data. Sample project schedules are also included for a variety of projects
• Provides examples of how-to write affinity notes and affinity labels, build an affinity diagram, and step-by-step instructions for consolidating sequence models
• Shows how to use consolidated data to define a design within tight time frames with examples of visions, storyboards, and paper prototypes
• Introduces CDTools™, the first application designed to support customer-centered design

Edition details

• Publisher: Morgan Kaufmann
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0123540518
• ISBN 13: 9780123540515
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 320