Hugh Beyer

Karen Holtzblatt

Contextual design is a state-of-the-art approach to designing products directly from an understanding of how the customer works and what the customer needs. Based on a method developed and taught by the authors, this is a practical, hands-on guide that articulates the underlying principles of contextual design and shows how to use them to address different problems, constraints, and organizational situations.

Defining Customer-centered Systems

Contextual Design

This lecture discusses the key elements of Agile for the UX community and describes strategies UX people can use to contribute effectively in an Agile team, overcome key weaknesses in Agile methods as typically implemented, and produce a more robust process and more successful designs. With the introduction and popularization of Agile methods of software development, existing relationships and working agreements between user experience groups and developers are being disrupted. Agile methods introduce new concepts: the Product Owner, the Customer (but not the user), short iterations, User Stories. Where do UX professionals fit in this new world? Agile methods also bring a new mindset-no big design, no specifications, minimal planning-which conflict with the needs of UX design. We present a process combining the best practices of Contextual Design, a leading approach to user-centered design, with those of Agile development and suggest project structures for large and small projects.

User-centered Agile Methods

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

Hugh Beyer

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