Rapid Contextual Design: A How-to Guide to Key Techniques for User-Centered Design

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Elsevier, Dec 31, 2004 - Computers - 320 pages

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 CDToolsTM, the first application designed to support customer-centered design
 

Contents

Acknowledgements
19
Chapter 1 Introduction
21
Chapter 2 Planning Your Rapid CD Project
33
Chapter 3 Planning Your Contextual Interviews
63
Chapter 4 The Contextual Inquiry Interview
79
Chapter 5 Contextual Interview Interpretation Session
101
Chapter 6 Work Modeling
123
Chapter 7 Consolidated Sequence Models
141
Chapter 11 Visioning a New Way to Work
209
Chapter 12 Storyboarding
229
Chapter 13 Testing with Paper Prototypes
245
Chapter 14 Paper Prototype Interviews
261
Chapter 15 Rapid CD and Other Methodologies
279
Chapter 16 Issues of Organizational Adoption
291
Appendix
301
Index
307

Chapter 8 Building an Affinity Diagram
159
Chapter 9 Using Contextual Data to Write Personas
181
Chapter 10 Walking the Affinity and Consolidated Sequences
193
Figure Credits
315
About the Authors
317
Copyright

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About the author (2004)

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.

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