Customer Reviews

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

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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)

:-)

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.

I don't know if the content of this book is good or bad, but reading it is like chewing on aluminum foil. It's painful...really painful. It's just so dry that it's worse than reading an instruction manual, and there is no motivation to read 'til the next page.

Worst book ever. Boring to read and is hardly useful. I guess if you need straight up step by step instructions on how to construct flow diagrams or conduct interviews/observe people then this book might be of use. I only bought this book because we were required for a University class. I'd save your money and look elsewhere if this book isn't mandatory for you. Or look for a used copy.

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.