Database Reference
In-Depth Information
CHAPTER 5
Detailed Design and Validation
The third part of Contextual Design deals with design itself: to take the concept developed
in Visioning Session and elaborated in the Cool Drilldown and give it a structure, function,
interaction, and look that enhances the users' lives. Creating good, innovative designs has
always been hard; now that connected devices are everywhere, fitting into life at every mo-
ment, the design task has only gotten harder and getting it right more critical. At the same
time,Agileprocesses[
5
,
6
]havereducedthetimeavailableforfocuseddesignthinking.The
steps in this third part of Contextual Design are designed to thread this needle—just enough
focused thinking to create a coherent design combined with quick and early prototyping and
iteration to refine the work in progress.
Designing all the parts of a product so they work together coherently is hard. It was al-
ways hard, even with large monolithic systems like standard ERP systems and big websites,
and it'seven harder when designers have to create apps that fit into moments in the person's
day. It's easy to get lost in the weeds, focusing on one part of one app, and lose any sense
of the overall structure and its relationship to people's lives. The challenge is to keep that
structure in mind and ensure its coherence even while working on the details of one part.
Designers need tools that represent the overall structure so they can analyze and discuss it
independent of the details of any part. (This is why web designers create site maps—they
areastructural viewofthesitethatshowallthepartsandtheirrelationships atahighlevel.)
Below, we'll share Contextual Design techniques and team-based activities that help the
team see their design structurally at every point—and so ensure the whole team shares the
same understanding of the emerging design.
In describing the design process it's convenient to think of design in layers, starting with
an abstract and fuzzy concept and refining it to produce a specific UI with precisely defined
function and interaction. We will describe Contextual Design's steps this way. But remem-
ber in the sections that follow, that these layers are not addressed purely sequentially, one
after another, as if this were a waterfall model. That doesn't work. Not only would it require
a long design phase—anathema to Agile development—but the layers inform each other. If
designers know that infinite scrolling (a low-level interaction paradigm) is available, it will
