About us

What We Do

Using our Contextual Design methodology, we design innovative, customer-centered product concepts, product suites, communication, and learning environments; leading edge portals; and online business communities. We also provide strategic market characterizations regarding the potential impact of new and emerging technologies. And, we deliver training services in our Contextual Design methodology.

The Contextual Design methodology, developed by Karen Holtzblatt and Hugh Beyer, is a customer-centered design process which uses extensive field data as the foundation for understanding users' needs, task, intents, and processes in order to design products that meet both users’ and business’ needs.

Karen and Hugh founded InContext in 1992. Since that time, we have worked with leaders and startups from a range of industries, including technology, telecommunications, publishing, and pharmaceuticals. Our clients include Hewlett-Packard, i2, IBM, Microsoft, Novell, Motorola, Nokia, SAP, Agilent, Thomson Corporation, Analog Devices, ON Semiconductor, Medtronic, MDL Information Systems, Cabletron, and Trellix.

We have been a major player in moving the high-tech industry from engineering-driven to customer-centered design for all types of products and technologies. Our first book, Contextual Design: Defining Customer-Centered Systems, has received 5-star reviews from Amazon.com readers and is used in design and human-computer interaction (HCI) curricula at universities and conferences throughout the world. Our second book, Rapid Contextual Design, is quickly gaining praise  throughout the design community.

The Founders

Karen Holtzblatt, CEO and Co-founder of InContext and Contextual Design

Karen is the visionary behind InContext's unique customer-centered design approach, Contextual Design. Karen's combination of technological and psychological expertise provides the creative framework for driving the development, innovative designs, and design processes.

Recognized as a leader in the design community, Karen has pioneered transformative ideas and design approaches throughout her career. At Digital Equipment Corporation, Karen introduced Contextual Inquiry — the industry standard for gathering field data to understand how technology impacts the way people work. Contextual Inquiry and the design processes based on it provide a revolutionary approach for designing new products and systems based on a deep understanding of the context of use. Contextual Inquiry forms the base of Contextual Design, InContext's full customer-centered design process.

Karen co-founded InContext Enterprises in 1992 to use Contextual Design techniques to coach product teams and deliver customer-centered designs to businesses across multiple industries. The books, Contextual Design: Defining Customer Centered Systems, and, most recently, Rapid Contextual Design, are used by companies and universities all over the world. InContext's CDTools™ product, launched in 2004, is the first tool suite to support teams doing customer-centered design. Karen’s extensive experience with teams and all types of work and life practice underlies the innovation and reliable quality consistently delivered by InContext's teams.

Karen also has more than 20 years of teaching experience, professionally and in university settings. She holds a doctorate in applied psychology from the University of Toronto.

Hugh Beyer, CTO and Co-founder of InContext and Contextual Design

Hugh provides the technical expertise to support InContext's design solutions. His extensive understanding of the unique and varied capabilities of a wide range of technical platforms enables InContext to design innovative solutions in virtually any development environment. He works closely with clients' engineering teams and developers to mesh often opposing points of view to build workable solutions. Hugh also works directly with InContext’s design teams and coaches client teams in the Contextual Design process. He has pioneered the integration of customer-centered techniques into traditional development, using them to supercharge the Rational Unified Process, object-oriented design, and XP.

Hugh has more than 20 years of experience building and designing applications, systems, and tools. Before co-founding InContext, Hugh acted as lead developer and architect in a range of systems at Digital Equipment Corp. His domains of experience include object-oriented repositories, databases, and integrated software development environments. Since starting InContext, Hugh has overseen the design of applications from desktop to web to mobile, and from enterprise to small business to consumers in the wide variety of industries supported by InContext.

He holds a B.S. degree in Applied Mathematics from Harvard.

Giving Back

Since its inception, InContext has donated a percentage of our income to YouthBuild USA, an organization that empowers inner city youth through a combination of education and training in the construction industry. It's a powerful, effective program — one we're proud to support.