Contextual Design Leadership Training

Interviewing — Review the four principles of Contextual Inquiry and how to train your team to lead contextual interviews. We review your customer interview video and provide practical, focused feedback on ways to improve.

Interpretation Session — Learn to run them, keep them on track, and record the right details.

Affinity Building — Build a section of an affinity diagram to learn what really makes it insightful and how it reveals design opportunities.

Model Consolidation — Learn how your project focus directs the consolidation, and practice leading the consolidation process on different kinds of data.

Visioning — Practice how to run an effective visioning session that incorporates brainstormed ideas and guides teams to a coherent, customer-based vision.

Requirements Definition — Discover how to abstract key features and user requirements out of the vision, tie them back to the supporting user data, and communicate to others in your organization.

Planning — Review your project situation with our experts, and create a project plan that includes how to collect and use contextual data in your organization.

Creating Storyboards — Utilize the vision and consolidated models to create use stories and lead a team through the storyboard process, and use the storyboards to work out the vision.

Building User Environment Designs (UED) — Become comfortable building a reverse UED of existing products to identify problems, opportunities for improvement, and potential integration points. Build a UED and use it to identify and fix structural problems. Learn to manage the team during design processes, including the UED validation.

Testing Designs with Paper Prototyping — Build paper prototypes from a UED, discussing options for designing the user interface without losing the UED structure. Adapt the method to gather requirements and iterate the UI. We review your videotape of a paper prototype interview and provide feedback on ways to improve.

Prioritizing for Design — Find out how to take the UED and cut it into coherent units that can be effectively rolled out over multiple releases.

Planning — Discuss your organizational situation and barriers. Define a plan to further the customer focus in your organization.

Assembling the Right Materials for Innovation — Become comfortable using the materials needed for innovation (focus, technology, business, and team members).

Fostering Innovation — Learn how to help the team use the innovation "tricks of the trade": focus, storythinking, metaphor, genres, and analogous data. Practice using the techniques.

Managing and Facilitating Organizational Change — Learn skills for helping yourself and your team become successful change agents in your organization.

Leading a Team — Learn techniques and processes for creating an environment for team work, managing individual differences and conflicts, and balancing personalities, styles, and skills.

Managing the Project — Successful projects need strong leaders and project managers. Learn the different ways you can schedule a project, options for scoping the project, the tradeoffs and shortcuts you can take, how to use process checks to keep your team on track, and ways to modify the process to fit your situation.

Planning — Discuss your specific projects and organization with our experts.