Contextual Techniques for User Experience Teams

This workshop helps your User Experience team both come up to speed on Contextual Design and develop a shared understanding of how to use contextual techniques in your organization. You’ll be able to work with the entire Contextual Design process while also creating a deliverable based on a core project relevant to multiple businesses in your company. That means this workshop has the key benefit of also delivering relevant data and design options to the businesses the User Experience team supports.

From this two-week workshop you’ll receive:

You can also extend this workshop to include an optional one-day session on persona creation.

Session One

Day 1: We teach the Contextual Inquiry approach to customer interviewing to the team in the morning. The team interviews customers in the afternoon. The InContext coach observes some of these field interviews, providing feedback to increase the skill of the team.

Day 2: We coach the team on running an interpretation session and introduce the flow and sequence models as key models to capture. We interpret the customer interviews.

Day 3: We lead the team in building an affinity diagram for the data collected. We consolidate roles and sequence models in parallel groups, allowing one-half of the group to get experience with flow consolidation and one-half to get experience with sequence consolidation. This provides consolidation skill to the group as a whole which can be shared later. We use the consolidated models and affinity diagram to identify key issues in the problem space.

Day 4: The team completes the consolidations and then we use the data to lead the group in a structured brainstorm to create a vision of how to respond to the data. You practice visioning in parallel groups.

Evening Session (2 hours): Throughout the week we discuss things to watch out for and tips on how to lead teams through these processes. W also run a special evening dinner and Question and Answer session to discuss organizational issues that have accumulated over the week. We talk about how Contextual Design may fit with your projects and your organizational constraints. In addition, you identify key issues or projects you would like to discuss in advance.

Day 5: We use the visions and the data to create storyboards. We discuss how to use the affinity, vision, and storyboard to drive design thinking in teams.

Interim Weeks: (2 to 4 weeks, at your option)

Between Session One and Two the team can do more interviews, interpret that data and extend the consolidations, and then agree on their vision and final storyboards.

Session Two

Day 1: We review the storyboards that the group has extended between the first and second sessions. We introduce the User Environment Design (UED) and have the team practice creating reverse UEDs in order to teach the concept. This provides the team with a way of doing both competitive analysis and analysis of existing products.

We show and practice how to drive the definition of a new system from the storyboards, representing it in a User Environment Design.

Day 2: The team designs and builds a paper prototype of the user interface based on the User Environment Design. We discuss any different elements of user interface design that are issues for the organization.

Day 3: We teach how to do a mock-up interview and in the afternoon we take the paper-prototype to 4-6 customers to test the system structure and user interface ideas. The InContext coach observes some of the mock-up interviews, providing feedback to increase skill.

Evening Session (2 hours): Throughout the week we discuss things to watch out for and tips on how to lead teams through these processes. We also run a second special evening dinner and Question and Answer session to discuss organizational issues that have accumulated over the process. We discuss how the Contextual Design process can fit into the work of the teams to which they are assigned.

Day 4: We show how to interpret the data from several of these interviews and discuss implications for the design. The team is encourages to do two more rounds of testing with mock-ups after the workshop before solidifying the design.

Day 5 (optional): One-Day Persona Workshop
Organizations that use personas, or that want to begin using them, can opt to extend Session Two by one day to include the persona workshop. The Persona Workshop teaches how to build rich personas by using the field data collected through Contextual Design.

In this workshop we begin by introducing the purpose of personas and their value as communication devices. We then explain the components of a persona: goals, roles, and tasks. We show examples of good personas and how their content link to the contextual data just collected.

Using the data collected by the team, we show how to identify the base persona and secondary personas. We then show the team how to walk their affinity diagram for goals and issues, the flow model for roles, and the sequence model for key tasks and strategies. The team practice this identification and collection.

The team then breaks into small groups and practices creating the outline of a set of core personas for their data, with feedback from the coach. The team is left ready to write a set of personas based on this outline.

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