How Contextual Design Supports Collaboration Among Team Members

How Contextual Design Supports

When designing a new product or service you need to be aware of the context in which your customers live and work. This includes physical context (such as the environment in which they will use your product), social context (the people who will interact with it), and cultural context (the larger societal norms and expectations that shape users’ behavior).

Karen Holtzblatt and Hugh Beyer developed Contextual Design in the early 1980s to make user-centered design processes more practical and applicable to industrial settings. It incorporates ethnographic methods for gathering data relevant to the product via field studies, rationalizing workflows, and designing human–computer interfaces.

Using one-on-one, in-the-field interviews with users in their actual work environments helps you understand their goals and the underlying structure of their tasks. This approach provides richer and more relevant information than self-reported work histories or lab-based studies, revealing low-level details that often go unnoticed. You can learn about interruptions, superstitious behaviors, illogical processes, and other things that might not show up in a lab setting.

How Contextual Design Supports Collaboration Among Team Members

The contexts of use are also reflected in the form and content of a product. For example, users want content to feel natural to them, so it is a good idea to use recognizable visual cues that align with the culture they are working in. This will help the product appear familiar and less like a foreign object.

For large-scale projects, the process also facilitates defining the most important problems to solve, prioritizing and rolling out the solution in the right order, and ensuring that as parts of the system roll out iteratively, engineering tradeoffs don’t degrade the overall user experience. It can also be helpful to use the context-based design process to identify a set of design principles that should be used throughout the project. These include affordability, consistency, and visual alignment with the user’s cultural context.

Contextual Design dovetails well with Agile development practices and supports the elicitation of viable user stories. In fact, it is the primary way to incorporate a reliable customer voice into Agile development. It also allows for the definition of a base level of function, which is then incorporated into the user story as a “what,” to guide the development of detailed functions and structure. Storyboards, the User Environment Design, and paper prototypes support this structural design work, and validate that the functionality is being inserted into the appropriate system places.

For teams with many stakeholders and a tight deadline, a clear team direction and process is essential to getting the job done. Building a collaborative, trusting team is the best way to achieve success in a time-constrained environment. Contextual Design encourages team members to share their ideas and views with each other, and to compare alternatives so they can come up with a unified product vision that will serve their users’ needs. This kind of collaborative effort is only possible when the team has a shared understanding of the product. The clarity that comes from contextual clarity also makes it easier for asynchronous participants to join the process, and to check in on progress at any point in time.