Karen Holtzblatt, Hugh Beyer
InContext Enterprises, Inc.
249 Ayer Rd.
Harvard, MA 01451
telephone: (508) 772-0001
email: karen @acm.org, beyer@acm.org
Field data gathering techniques such as Contextual Inquiry enable a design team to gather the detailed data
they need. These techniques produce enormous amounts of information on how the customers of a system
work. This creates a new problem-how to represent all this detail in a coherent, comprehensible form, which
can be a suitable basis for design? An affinity diagram effectively shows the scope of the customer problem,
but is less effective at capturing and coherently representing the details of how people work. Design teams
need a way to organize this detail so they can use it within their own development process.
In this tutorial we present the latest methods for representing detailed information about work practice and
using these representations to drive system design. These methods have been adopted over the last few
years by major product development and information systems organizations. We show how to represent the
work of individual users, how to generalize these to describe a whole market or department, and how to use
these to drive innovative design. We present both the representation methods and the process by which we
build and use them. Participants receive extensive practice in the techniques and also in the team skills
necessary to do this work as part of a design team. We show how these methods fit into the Contextual
Design process, which gathers field data and uses it to drive design through a well-defined series of steps.
The tutorial is particularly appropriate for those who have used field techniques, especially Contextual
Inquiry, and would like to put more structure on the process of using field data.
design process, customer-centered design, usability, team design, domain analysis, work modeling
Systems and products are built to help people work better. They cannot be built well without understanding
how people work. Techniques such as Contextual Inquiry gather the necessary data, but producing a good
system requires that the data and its use be incorporated into a coherent design process. Such a design
process would lead a team from data about specific users to a design addressing the needs of an entire
market or department, providing ways to represent the design and iterate it with users.
In this section of the tutorial, we describe how we approach the problem of building a system which
matches the users' work. We describe our overall design process to show how data gathering and the work
modeling methods taught in this course fit into a comprehensive process. We briefly describe Contextual
Inquiry to show how detailed data can be collected to drive the rest of the process.
If systems and products exist to support people's work, understanding how people do work and should work
is critical to understanding how to develop products that will help them work better. But understanding
work it hard: there is no discipline of understanding how people work, the concepts, distinctions, and issues
of work practice are not general knowledge, and we have no language for describing work practice. Without
a language, it is hard to communicate work practice to others. To remedy this deficiency, we have
developed work models, drawings that incorporate important distinctions about work. These models show
the roles people play in the organization and how they communicate; the social and emotional context in
which work happens; the sequence of actions which accomplish work; the details of the physical site and
work place in which work happens; and the artifacts which support work and capture work results.
In this section we describe the need for work models, describe each work model in turn, and give
participants practice building each type of work model on their own from a simplified transcript. When
participants have learned the basic technique, they form small teams and build all work models in parallel,
from a real interview transcript, as in a real design process.
Products and systems are built for sale to a market or use by a department; they are not built for individual
users. But we gather data from individual users-how do we represent what these users tell us about all
users? Without a well-defined way to generalize from specific users, we appear to be designing from
anecdotal evidence. Work model consolidation is such a well-defined process, resulting in a small set (5-7)
of work models which characterize the work structure and basic work strategies across all customers. These
models can be shown to account or not to account for the work practice of any individual user.
In this section, we describe the consolidation process for each type of work model. Participants then
practice consolidating work models from several users in small teams.
Ultimately, system design is the invention of the system response to a user problem. Without adequate
customer data this invention is ungrounded-it is not driven from deep knowledge of how people organize
their work, and cannot be developed in its details to support customers' work well. Without a coherent
understanding of work, design tends to degenerate into lists of features that do not consider the system as a
whole, or that depend on the designers keeping the whole system in their heads. Work models capture
precisely the detail necessary to ensure invention is grounded in customer work, provides a coherent
solution to a whole work problem, and is developed to support actual work practice.
In this section, we describe the grounded brainstorm process by which we do this. Together, participants use
consolidated models to identify key work issues, brainstorm responses to those issues, and redesign, step by
step, what it will be like to work in the new system.
A clearly defined, customer-centered design process guiding a team from initial data gathering to system
design is possible today. In this tutorial we lead participants through the key transition in that process:
making customer work practice real, generalizing to a market or department, and inventing a system
response which remains true to the data. We show how the material in this tutorial links to field research
techniques such as Contextual Inquiry and to the later design process which formalizes and elaborates the
initial design.
Keywords
CONTENT
Gathering Design Data
Representing Customer Work
Characterizing a Market or Department
Inventing a System Response
CONCLUSION
References