Keywords
design process, contextual inquiry, customer-centered design, ethnography,
usability, team design, domain analysis
Introduction
Contextual techniques, which ensure good system design by taking the designer
out into the users' world, are revolutionizing the way organizations approach
design. But since the techniques are still new and unfamiliar, practitioners
still wrestle with the problem of marrying this new way of working to
traditional development. This SIG gives practitioners the chance to hear others
tell how they successfully overcame this challenge, to share their experience,
and to get help and perspective on the specific problems they face.
The SIG will interest practitioners and researchers concerned with gathering and
using of field data in design, whether they do this now or would like to do it
in the future.
CONTENT
Contextual techniques include field research techniques such as contextual
inquiry, ethnographic techniques, and participatory design techniques. They also
include methods such as Contextual Design, which address the full design problem
from gathering data about the customer in the field through developing and
testing a coherent design based on that data. This SIG addresses the use of
these techniques in their organizational context: how to put together a design
team, how to get to the customer, how to keep a design team focused on customer
data, and how to transition designs successfully into standard engineering
practice.
This SIG mixes presentation of experience with discussion to give participants a
feel for what is being done to make contextual techniques part of real
development, who is doing it, and how they have brought their design and
development teams along. Participants should leave with a good sense for the
stability and usefulness of the techniques, and some clear pointers on what they
can do in their own jobs to take advantage of them.
Agenda
Brief orientation to the problem: what contextual techniques are, and typical
problems teams have using them in a traditional development organization.
One or two experience reports. Practitioners from Novell/WordPerfect and Glaxo,
Inc., who have successfully used contextual techniques to produce products or
systems in their own jobs, tell what they did and how they overcame
organizational barriers to feed the data into the development process. Questions
and group discussion follows each presentation.
Participants share their own successes, problems, or issues. Group discussion
gives perspective or suggests solutions.
PROPOSAL CONTEXTUAL TECHNIQUES: HANDLING THE ORGANIZATION
The proposed SIG follows on the SIG War Stories and Experience Designing with
Contextual Techniques offered at CHI '94. At that time we were urged to make
this an annual event to support a continuing conversation among practitioners in
which they could share experience and problems.
In this year's SIG, we propose to focus on the problem of creating a project
team that uses contextual techniques. Introducing any new process into an
organization is hard, and introducing contextual techniques (indeed, any
qualitative technique) is especially hard because they are very different from
the way many organizations are used to working. People struggling to make the
approach real at different organizations need to learn:
It is possible-others in industry are successfully introducing these techniques;
Approaches for dealing with the organization-how others have gotten permission
to start working this way, have created cross-functional design teams, have used
the data to affect designs, and have moved the organization to adopting these
approaches as standard practice;
How to apply the techniques to the specific problems of their organization.
We plan to structure the conversation as follows:
We introduce what contextual techniques are, and talk about principles of
handling teams and organizations. This ensures that everyone knows what we are
talking about, and gives a common ground for comparing different approaches.
Two practitioners share their experience: senior engineers from Glaxo's
Information Technology department and from Novell's WordPerfect division. Each
has been successful using contextual techniques to ship systems furthering the
primary mission of their organization: developing new product versions, and an
important internal application. Each has been successful fitting the contextual
work into the overall development process of their organization.
Each will talk for about 15 minutes, after which there will be time for
questions and discussion.
Participants in the SIG will have the opportunity to share their successes,
problems, or issues. Each will have about five minutes to tell their story or
explain their problem, and other participants will respond.
