INTERVIEW with Karen Holtzblatt

Karen Holtzblatt is the originator of Con- Contextual has team and indi- textual Inquiry, a process for gathering vidual activities that bring them through fi eld data on product use, which was the those processes in an orderly so precursor to Contextual Design, a com- that you can deliver a reliable result that plete method for the design of systems. works for people. So you could say that Together with Hugh Beyer, the codeveloper Contextual Design is a set of techniques of Contextual Design, Karen Holtzblatt is to be used in a customer-centered design cofounder of InContext Enterprises, which process with design teams. It is also a set of specializes in process and practices that help people engage in crea- consulting. tive and productive with user data and it helps them co-operate and HS: What is Contextual Design? design together. KH: If you’re going to build something that people want, there are basically three HS: What are the steps of Contextual large steps that you have to go through. Design? The fi rst question that you ask as a com- KH: In the ‘what matters’ piece, we go out pany is, “What in the world matters to into the fi eld, we talk with people about the customer or user such that if we make their work or life practice as they do it: something, they’re likely to buy it and use that’s Contextual Inquiry and that’s a one- it?” So the question is “What matters?” on-one, two to two-and-a-half-hour fi eld Now once you identify what the issues interview. Then we interpret that data with are, every corporation will have the corpo- a cross-functional team, and we model rate response of how to change the human the activities with fi ve work models: The practice with technology to improve it. fl ow model showing communication and This is the ‘vision.’ Finally you have to coordination, the cultural model showing work out the details and structure the infl uences between people, both from law, vision into a product or system or website and from geography, the physical model or handheld application . . . . In any design looking at the physical environment’s role process, whether it’s formalized or not, in organizing activity, the sequence model every company must do these things. They showing the steps of a task or business have to fi nd out what matters, they have to process, and the artifact model showing vision their corporate response, and then the things people use and how they are they have to structure it into a system. used. We also capture individual points on

CCINTERVIEW04.inddINTERVIEW04.indd 1 118/06/118/06/11 110:440:44 AMAM INTERVIEW WITH KAREN HOLTZBLATT 2

virtual post-it notes. After the interpreta- interface drive development of the object tion session, every person we interviewed model. Finally, we do visual design and has a set of models and a set of post-its. mock the whole system up in an interac- Our next step is to consolidate all that data tive environment and test that too. In this because you don’t want to be designing way we deal with , visual from one person, from yourself, or from design and branding testing as well. any one interview; we need to look at the This is the whole process of Con- structure of the practice itself. The con- textual Design, a full front-end design solidation step means that we end up with process. Because it is done with a cross- an affi nity diagram and fi ve consolidated functional team, everyone in the organi- models showing the issues across the target zation knows what they’re doing at each population. point: they know how to select the data, At that point, we have modeled the they know how to work in groups to get work practice as it is and we have now all these different steps done. So not only six communication devices that the team do you end up with a set of design think- can dialog with. Each one of them poses a ing techniques that help you to design, you point of view on which to have the conver- have an organizational process that helps sation ‘what matters?’ the organization actually do it. Now the team moves into that second activity, which is “what should our cor- HS: How did the idea of Contextual Design porate response be?” We have a visioning emerge? process that is a very large group story- KH: Contextual Design started with the telling process to reinvent the practice invention of Contextual Inquiry in a post- given technological possibility and the core doctoral internship with John Whiteside at competency of the business. After that, we Digital in about 1987. At the time, usabil- develop storyboards driven by the consoli- ity testing and issues had been dated data and the vision. At this point we around maybe eight years or so and he have not done a ; we have was asking the question, “Usability iden- redesigned the practice. In Contextual tifi es about 10 to 20% of the fi xes at the Design we redesign the practice fi rst, see- tail end of the process to make the frosting ing the technology as it will appear within on the cake look a little better to the user. the work or life activity that will change. What would it take to really fi gure out To structure the system we start by what people want in the product and sys- rolling the storyboards into a User Envi- tem?” Contextual Inquiry was my answer ronment Design (UED)—the structure to that question. After that, I took a job of the system itself, independent of the with Lou Cohen’s Quality group at DEC, user interface and the object model or where I picked up the affi nity diagram implementation. The UED operates like idea. Also at that time, Pelle Ehn and Kim a software fl oor plan that structures the Madsen were talking about Morten Kyng’s movement inside the product. This is used ideas on paper mock-ups and I added to drive the , which is paper prototyping with post-its to check mocked up in paper and tested and iter- out the design. Sandy Jones and I worked ated with the user. When it has stabilized, out the lower details of Contextual the UED, the storyboards, and the user Inquiry then Hugh and I hooked up. He’s

CCINTERVIEW04.inddINTERVIEW04.indd 2 118/06/118/06/11 110:440:44 AMAM INTERVIEW WITH KAREN HOLTZBLATT 3

a software and object-oriented developer. good idea.” And basically they reconstruct We started working with teams and we many aspects of the Contextual Design noticed that they didn’t know how to go process as they hit the next problem—of from the data to the design and they didn’t course adding their own fl avor and twists know how to structure the system to think and things they learned along the way. about it. So then we invented more of the Now it’s not quite that clean, but work models and the UED. my point is that organizational adoption So the Contextual Design method is about people making it their own and came from looking at the software devel- taking on the parts, changing them, doing opment practice; we evolved every single what they can. You have to get somebody step of this process based on what people to do something and then once they do needed. The whole process was worked out something it snowballs. with real people doing real design in real From an organization change perspec- companies. So, where did it come from? It tive it is nice that Contextual Design gen- came from dialog with the problem. erates paper and a design room as part of the process. The design room creates a talk HS: What are the main problems that event, and the talk event pulls everyone in organizations face when putting Contex- because they want to know what you’re tual Design into practice? doing. Then if they like the data, others KH: The question is, “What does organi- feel left out, and because they feel left out zational change look like?” because that’s they want to do a project and they want to what we’re talking about. The problem is have a room for themselves as well. that people want to change and they don’t The biggest complaint about Contex- want to change. What we communicate tual Design is that it takes too long. Some to people is that organizational change is of that is about time, some of it is about piecemeal. In order to own a process you thought. You have people who are used to have to say what’s wrong with it, you have coding and now have to think about fi eld to change it a little bit, you have to say how data. They’re not used to that. So for that whoever invented the process is wrong and reason we wrote Rapid CD—to help peo- how the people in the organization want ple see how to pick and choose techniques to fi x it, you have to make it fi t with your from Contextual Design in short amounts organizational culture and issues. Most of time. people will adopt the fi eld-data gathering fi rst and that’s all they’ll do and they’ll tell HS: You have recently published a book on me that they don’t have time for anything Rapid CD. What are the compromises that else and they don’t need anything else, you made when integrating Contextual and that’s fi ne. And then they’ll wake up Design into a shortened product lifecycle? one day and they’ll say, “We have all this KH: The most important thing to under- qualitative stuff and nobody’s using it . . . stand about Contextual Design and in point maybe we should have a debriefi ng ses- of fact any user-centred design approach sion.” So then they have debriefi ng ses- is that time is completely dependent on sions. Then they wake up later on and scope. The second factor, which is actually they say, “We don’t have any way of struc- secondary to scope, is the number of mod- turing this information . . . models are a els that you use to represent the data.

CCINTERVIEW04.inddINTERVIEW04.indd 3 118/06/118/06/11 110:440:44 AMAM INTERVIEW WITH KAREN HOLTZBLATT 4

Rapid CD creates guidelines to help Finally, depending on the problem and how you identify a small enough scope so Contextual Design is being used we may that you can get user data into projects or may not have sequence models (task quickly. If you have a small tight scope analysis) as part of Rapid CD. then it’s going to take less time because To make it easy for people we charac- you’re going to interview fewer users, terised Rapid CD into three smaller proc- and you’re going to have a less extensive esses: Lightning Fast, Lightning Fast Plus, design. Limiting your product or system and Focused Rapid CD. With Lightning to one to four job types means that your Fast you use Contextual Design up to the scope is going to be small, and then after end of the visioning process and then fol- the visioning process you can prioritize low your normal process to work out the scope again. At that point you may end detailed design. It appears shorter because up prioritising out roles and aspects of we’re just using Contextual Design for the the vision that can be addressed later. The requirements gathering phase and to con- next phase of Rapid CD is working out ceptualise the product or process. the details of the design through paper In Lightning Fast Plus you do the prototyping and visual design and so on. visioning process and work up your ideas This phase is again completely depend- your way, then you mock up your inter- ent on scope. If we already started with faces, and take them out and test them with one to four roles, you’re not going to users. Any time you’re not testing with the have more than that so you can keep the user you’re at risk. So in Lightning Fast number of screens to be developed small Plus we’re skipping storyboarding, exten- enough to manage quickly. The difference sive modeling, and the UED. between this process and a normal Con- In Focused Rapid CD you do sequence textual Design process is that you are lim- consolidation for a task analysis, vision a iting scope and as a result you can do it solution, then storyboarding, paper mock- with fewer people and in less time. ups, and testing. So Focused Rapid CD The second thing that we do in Rapid eliminates the UED and the rest of the CD is we limit the number of models. One models. Focused Rapid CD says if you thing that we cut out is the UED. We elimi- have a task or a small process then you nate the UED because we’ve limited the really need to do consolidated sequences, in scope and if we’re doing something simple other words, you need to do task analysis. like a webpage where you already have the In typical webpage design you don’t need idea of a webmap (which is effectively a sequences unless you’re doing transac- UED), or you’re doing the next version of a tions. If all you’re doing is an information particular product which means you already environment, you don’t need sequences. have system structure, then you can go from But any time you need to do task analysis having the data and the vision to mocking then the recommendation would be that up some user interfaces. So we eliminate you use Focused Rapid CD. the UED without feeling that we’re losing quality because we’ve reduced scope. One HS: What’s the future direction of Contex- model we don’t cut out at all is the affi nity tual Design? diagram because it’s the best organisation KH: Every process can always be tweaked. and structure for understanding the issues. I think the primary parts of Contextual

CCINTERVIEW04.inddINTERVIEW04.indd 4 118/06/118/06/11 110:440:44 AMAM INTERVIEW WITH KAREN HOLTZBLATT 5

Design are there. There are interesting to business process redesign works well with directions in which it can go, but there’s quantitative approaches like Six Sigma. Our only so much we can get our audience to initial work on this has shown that Con- buy. textual Design uncovers root causes and I think that for us there are two key processes to address much much faster than things that we’re doing. One is we’re start- typical process mapping. And our visioning ing to talk about design and what design process helps redesign process and tech- is, so we can talk about the role of design nology together—so that they inform each and design thinking. And we are still help- other instead of trying to deal with one at ing train everyone who wants to learn. But a time. We hope to have more stories about the other thing we’re fi nding is that some- these successes in the future. times the best way to support the client is But for most organizations looking to to do the design work for them. So we have adopt a customer-centered design proc- the design wing of the business where we ess, the standard Contextual Design is put together the Contextual Design teams. enough for now, they have to get started. What clients really like is our hybrid design And because Contextual Design is a scaf- process where we create a cross company folding, they can plug other processes team and do the work together—they learn into it, as we suggest with Rapid CD. and we get the result. Most organizations haven’t got a back- A new challenge for Contextual Design bone for customer-centered design, and is its role in Six Sigma process redefi nition Contextual Design is a good backbone to work. We believe that qualitative approaches start with. ■

CCINTERVIEW04.inddINTERVIEW04.indd 5 118/06/118/06/11 110:440:44 AMAM