Tutorial #24

Contextual Design: Using Customer Work Models to Drive Systems Design

Karen Holtzblatt, Hugh Beyer, InContext Enterprises, Inc.

Monday, April 15, full-day

Benefits

You will learn how to develop work models for representing data from field studies in a comprehensible form that is suitable for system design.

Origins

This highly rated tutorial from CHI '95 has been updated for CHI 96.

Features

contextual influences on people in their work environments
work modeling techniques that represent customers' work practices
different types of work models for representing different aspects of users' tasks, environments, communication paths, and organizational culture
how to drive design decisions from work models
consolidating work models to reveal common structure, work strategies, intents, and concepts
techniques to generate, evaluate, and iterate innovative designs from work models

Audience

Anyone interested in customer-centered design, requirements analysis, or tailoring products and systems to people's work. The tutorial will be especially valuable for those who have experience collecting field data about users and want to learn how to use that information to influence system design.

Presentation

Lecture, video, demonstration, and hands-on exercises.

Instructors

Karen Holtzblatt and Hugh Beyer are co-founders of InContext Enterprises, Inc., a firm that works with companies such as Microsoft and WordPerfect coaching teams to design products, product strategies, and information systems from customer data. Karen and Hugh are developers of Contextual Design, a customer-centered design process that extends the Contextual Inquiry data gathering technique. Karen is an originator of the Contextual Inquiry approach to field data collection and has pioneered the introduction of this technique into working engineering teams. Hugh has worked in industry for the past 12 years as a programmer, architect, and consultant, and has developed processes for using customer data to drive object-oriented design.