Contextual design
by Hugh Beyer, Karen Holtzblatt · first published 1997
86% recommend14% neutral
Why HN recommends it
Practical method for customer-centered design built on field observation and interviews, useful for untangling complex workflows. Recommended for designers, researchers, and startups wanting a lightweight approach.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
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…favorite UX books: The Design of Everyday Things (http://www.amazon.com/Design-Everyday-Things-Donald-Norman/d...) The Humane Interface (http://www.amazon.com/Humane-Interface-Directions-Designing-...) Contextual Design (http://www.amazon.com/Contextual-Design-Customer-Centered-In...)
on “Ask HN: Where to look to learn UX/Design” ↗Ethnographers tend to be rather hands off (/against) directly changing who they're observing. Contextual Inquiry (http://www.usabilitynet.org/tools/contextualinquiry.htm, http://www.amazon.com/Contextual-Design-Customer-Centered-In...) is a fairly light weight method and I think would benefit a lot of startups.
on “Why I turned down $500K and shut down my startup” ↗…to apply her research to Lean methodologies, building Features only around Emotional Triggers. This is what we are aiming at, but I am making this connection right now, I believe, in saying this.) 7. [Contextual Design: Defining Customer-Centered Systems](http://www.amazon.com/Contextual-Design-Customer-Centered-In...) by Hugh Beyer, Karen Holtzblatt
on “It Is Not Flat Design. It's Just Proper Design” ↗If you're willing to put in the effort for some serious study, then try these 2 books. They worked very well for me. a. About Face 3 by Alan Cooper b. Contextual Design by Karen Holtzblatt These two will set you up.
on “Ask HN: How to learn design and UX as a software engineer?” ↗> any good resources for developing good UX for necessarily complex use cases? For teasing apart complex workflows I'd suggest Holtzblatt and Beyer's Contextual Design book, I taught a user-centered research and design class many years ago and used that as our textbook, hopefully it still holds up. For organizing complex applications I like to start with affinity diagrams,…
on “Free software scares normal people” ↗From another recent thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1768358 Favorite UX books The Design of Everyday Things The Humane Interface Contextual Design
on “Good books on UI/UX design?” ↗"There is a philosophy called Contextual Design, every designer at Nokia has been trained in it by the guru Karen Holtzblatt. Everybody has attended her courses and got her very expensive book signed. The idea is that you ask the users what they are…
on “Five Reasons to be cheerful about Nokia-Microsoft” ↗