Introduction - Contextual Design: Evolved - page 2

business and ensure the solution is one the company can successfully deliver. It can then
feed into the company's existing development practice. Development practices change
over time, but they all need clear design direction * —and that is what Contextual Design
provides.
Contextual Design was developed and continues to be driven by the realization that a
product is always part of a larger practice, used in the context of other tools and manual
processes to make the user's overall life and work. Product design is really about the re-
design of the user's work and life, given technological possibilities—designing a new and
better way for users to live their lives, achieve their intents, touch the people that matter to
them,andperformtheiractivitiesbyintroducingbettertoolsandsystems.Thisunderstand-
ing has only become more compelling as smartphones, tablets, and other devices continue
to infiltrate our lives.
Because life and technology are so closely knit, users must be understood in their own
context. Usability testing, focus groups, and questionnaires—any data gathering technique
with fixed questions and predefined tasks—takes the user out of the context of his or her
life. Without the rich context of the user's real life, these methods cannot reveal the most
importantdesignissues:theusers'motivations,values,emotions,strategies,work-arounds,
real-time interruptions and interactions with others, and the constraints imposed by real-
worldconditions.ThecoreofContextualDesignistounderstandusersintheirownsetting,
using that understanding to develop deep insight into their lives and applying that insight
to a design problem.
This rich data is necessary if the team is to have an accurate, trustworthy basis for
driving design thinking, but it's only the first of many immersion activities in Contextual
Design. That deep, intuitive feeling for the users and their world must be carried through
the whole design process and realized in the final product. Therefore, Contextual Design
continually re-immerses the team in the data and in the context of users' lives, first in the
interviews, then in interpretation sessions, representing users' lives in models, driving in-
novation from the data, designing to respond to specific issues in the data, and finally, re-
turning to users to iterate and refine proposed solutions.
Continual immersion prevents what we call “design from the I”—designing solutions
based on “what I like” or what “seems reasonable to me”—essentially the team designing
for themselves. The designer is almost never a good surrogate for the user. They know too
much and love technology too much to design for the general public. And they know too
little about specific work domains to get the details of a design right. Even a subject mat-
ter expert doesn't have the articulated understanding, reflecting broad user experience, that
the design team needs. What parts of paying a family's bills are quick and can be done in
spare moments on an app—and what parts require heads-down focused attention? What
quick questions do medical practitioners need answered right away—and what questions