Side-by-Side Coaching

Whether you're addressing a new market or adding new functions to an existing product, our side-by-side coaching gives your team hands-on, step-by-step guidance in Contextual Design. Our expert is with your team at key intervals, introducing you to and coaching you through each new technique as it is needed, and leaving you with a plan and process to follow between visits. This learn-by-doing approach ensures that your team develops a customer-centered design and becomes skilled and practiced in the techniques, all while producing your deliverable.

Depending on the coaching program, you'll receive:

Customer data. Reusable data organized to reveal scope, key work issues, user needs, and product opportunities.

Work models. Consolidated models showing common tasks and work structure across all your customers.

Visions and storyboards. The users' work practice re-designed and restructured to better support their goals.

User Environment Design. A system structure that groups product features to meet user needs, and supports coherent prioritization and future version roll outs.

User interface designs. Alternative designs prototyped in paper and iteratively tested with users.

Personas and scenarios. Communication and design tools driven by real customer data.

All coaching programs include a license for CDTools™, giving you an efficient way to ensure that your data can be leveraged throughout your organization.

Coaching Programs

We'll work with you to shape the service that’s right for your organization's objectives.

Jump Start. If you have an existing product version and want to use customer data to iterate or develop a new version of it, Jump Start coaching supports you in collecting customer data and using it in your design quickly. We coach you in the Contextual Design process using selected work models, taking you through to testing the design on users with paper prototyping.

Just-in-Time. When your project has strategic objectives such as new products, new markets, or new directions for an existing product, Just-in-Time coaching addresses your problem. We guide your team through the whole Contextual Design process, including options to create a rollout plan with our prioritization process.

Requirements Gathering. When your goal is to collect customer data and generate requirements without immediately designing a system and testing it with customers, this service is for you. We focus on gathering the data, consolidating it to see the key issues among your customers, visioning the new or re-designed product, and abstracting requirements from the vision.

Customer-Centered Market Strategy. If you want to characterize your market and identify product opportunities consistent with your business objectives, we coach your team to collect and interpret the data and identify possible product concepts. To develop a full product strategy, follow up this market study with a Jump-Start service that develops one or two of these concepts in detail.

Persona Creation. When you want to create personas, we can help you take your consolidated customer data — affinity diagram and work models created by following the Contextual Design process — and use them to produce high-quality personas. This service can either follow one of our other Contextual Design coaching services or be conducted after you have collected and consolidated the data on your own. At your request, we can also coach you in writing usage scenarios for your personas.

Additional Support Services

Coaching programs can be extended to include one of our support services.

Data Browser Creation. We can put the affinity and other work models you create online for you. Get your data into our online into a data browser so your data can be available throughout the organization.

Release Prioritization. When you have finalized your system structure with paper prototype interviews,our prioritization service walks your team through creating coherent releases based on customer value, cost, effort, and sales point.

Visual Design and Interaction Design. If your organization needs help with completing the visual design and creating and testing the interaction design, our designers can do the work for you. Learn more about our services >

Contact us to discuss which service can solve your problem.