Risks of Not Using Contextual Design
Have you ever walked into a retail store, museum, or office space that evoked multiple senses with pleasing visuals and music? Then you’ve experienced experiential design – the practice of arranging space and creating environments that influence how users feel about your product or service. The goal is to make people remember your brand and drive more sales or conversions.
Contextual Design is a user-centered design process that leverages in-depth field research to drive innovative design. First invented in 1988, it’s now used by a wide range of industries and taught in universities around the world.
Unlike traditional market research methods, which use a narrow set of questions to guide participants, contextual interviewing is more like an apprenticeship, where researchers partner with users to watch them work and draw out their work practices in detail. This approach helps researchers better understand what they’re seeing, rather than just guessing at the causes.
Risks of Not Using Contextual Design in the Software Development Process
The result is a rich, in-depth data set that can help your team build personas and create detailed, well-rounded requirements to shape the design of a new product or feature. Typically conducted in the exploratory phase of a project, this form of research is best used after more general UX testing and before ethnographic research.
It’s incredibly easy for biases to sneak into software development processes without proper countermeasures. This is especially true when the entire team consists of designers who only know their own lives and experiences; unless they’re rigorously pursuing diverse hiring, collecting objective research data, and partnering closely with users, any software they produce will be a reflection of those biases. Contextual Design is designed to push teams outside their bubble and place the user’s experience front and center.
Using contextual inquiry to identify user needs helps you get to the root of problems and create empathetic solutions. The process can be used to improve simple flows, such as newsletter signups or e-commerce checkout processes, but it’s most effective with complex workflows that require high levels of thinking from participants. Whether it’s a chef cooking during a dinner rush or a data analyst working with complex datasets, contextual inquiry allows you to capture the full flow of user behavior and provide an accurate picture of what the product must do to meet the user’s goals.
While the Agile and FDD approaches to building software put a huge emphasis on quickly producing and iterating an MVP, they can sometimes fall into the trap of “move fast and break things” thinking that can leave behind some poor user outcomes. On the other hand, contextual design is intentionally slow and thorough, placing an emphasis on intentionality and thoughtfulness over a trial-and-error mentality.
Contextual Design uses paper prototypes and short iterations with users to work out detailed user interface design, bringing the actual experience to life for them and helping them visualize how it might look and function. The result is a more complete understanding of the user’s needs that can be translated into a comprehensive product requirements document and a more thorough user interface specification.