Rapid Contextual Design: A How-to Guide to Key Techniques for User-Centered Design (Interactive Technologies) (Paperback)

~ (Author), Jessamyn Burns Wendell (Author), Shelley Wood (Author) "This handbook is a how-to companion to the main Contextual Design book, Contextual Design: Defining Customer-Centered Systems..." (more)
Key Phrases: affinity building process, paper prototype interviews, affinity notes, Focused Rapid, Lightning Fast, Defining Customer-Centered Systems (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Review

Rapid Contextual Design is a timely, relevant book for technical communicators. Whether you are a seasoned usability professional or a novice trying to develop your awareness of user-centered design, you should add this title to your bookshelf." - Eddie VanArsdall, Technical Communication

Here are those little gems of advice that a skilled mentor who peered over your shoulder would tell you. If you lack such a mentor, this book is the next best thing, explaining just what you need to do in a straightforward, easy to read, easy to understand manner.
--Don Norman, Nielsen Norman group, Prof., Northwestern University,Author of Emotional Design

The new how-to guide boosts the value of the original Contextual Design book by transforming a design method into pragmatic advices of how to run a Contextual Design project in your own environment.
--Joerg Beringer, Director, Strategic Product Design, SAP-AG

A wise guide to interface design dos and don'ts, from people with experience. They create a new language for thinking about design processes, combining a compelling structured process with sufficient freedom for innovative excursions.
--Ben Shneiderman, University of Maryland

Rapid Contextual Design provides a further step in innovation by providing detailed, practical advice on how to conduct successful research projects and to fit the project to the need. My team welcomes these new advances and the flexibility they will provide when we conduct future projects using this method.
--Terry Austin, User Experience Group Manager, Microsoft

Book Description

A hands-on workbook that is a follow-up to the best selling Contextual Design

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Product Details

• Paperback: 320 pages
• Publisher: Morgan Kaufmann; illustrated edition edition (December 28, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0123540518
• ISBN-13: 978-0123540515
• Product Dimensions: 10.9 x 8.5 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #307,751 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars Practitioner's guide to contextual design - now with more agile / scrum, March 6, 2009

By	Dug (Seattle, WA) - See all my reviews

Karen's process is something that actually works, unlike many psudo-ethnographic customer engagement strategies.

By maintaining a connection to the customer data from the beginning to the end, it uniquely empowers you with a defensible design rationale. Something few other approaches can say.

A true roadmap for playing nicely with agile development is also something you won't find in most other customer research methodologies, especially contextual ones.

Whether or not you are willing to live the process and follow the steps outlined is another matter. Your mileage may vary, especially if you decided to line item veto particular aspects.

4.0 out of 5 stars Clarifies the line between theory and practice!, May 15, 2008

By	Porgy Tirebiter (Santa Fe, NM USA) - See all my reviews

If you are looking for an elegant, academic theory to suggest how contextual design might work in some controlled laboratory experiment-- this is not the book for you. This work gives step-by-step procedures on how to conduct contextual design in the real, uncontrolled world of people's lives, and how to do this work on an accelerated time schedule.

This is a clear tutorial and worthy "field manual" on contextual design, task sequence modeling, affinity diagrams, and paper prototyping for applied work in the real world.

Because it takes you through each activity step-by-step, this book does name the tools used at the time this work was crafted. Some reviewers consider that blatant advertising-- and in the case of citations for "CDTools" perhaps that's true. But in most cases it is very helpful to know that some specific products are more field-worthy than others. I strongly doubt these authors have any financial interest in boosting sales of 3M Post-It notes. (Though Amazon may profit from sales of 3M - 2051-FLT - 3M Post-it Bright Colors Memo Cube)

:-)

9 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Blurring the Lines Between Advertising and Education, March 5, 2008

By	Thomas E. Hayden (Detroit, MI United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This was an assigned reading for a graduate level course at a Big Ten University. I wish our instructors had written their own book or selected a different text because this text is terrible in an academic setting. Flipping through the book, there are constant references to various brand names and software tools. Using the digital edition in-text search, I found the following:

-The Sharpie(r) brand appears on 6 different pages. We're instructed to buy 12 red sharpies, 12 blue sharpies, and 12 green sharpies.
-The Postit(r) brand appears on 53 unique pages. Including this gem, "Use high-end sticky notes like the Post-it(r) brand because other, less expensive brands will fall off the wall more easily over time" (page 164)
-The company 3M is mentioned on 4 unique pages.
-The software tool CDTools is mentioned on 32 distinct pages. CDTools costs $750.00. CDTool's parent company, InContext, is mentioned on 10 distinct pages. Coincidently, Co-author Karen Holtzblatt is one of the founders. Other software (such as Visio or Powerpoint) is only mentioned twice, one of which is just a client case study.

I think the statistics speak for themselves.

I think Rapid Contextual Design (as a concept) carries some weight as a business process, however it should not be put into a book that reads like a shill for their software tools. Perhaps this would be a great book to bundle with CDtools or sell to companies but is *not* appropriate for an academic setting.