Design Resources

Contextual Design Books

Rapid Contextual Design: A How-to Guide to Key Techniques for User-Centered Design By Karen Holtzblatt, Jessamyn Burns Wendell, and Shelley Wood This handbook introduces Rapid Contextual Design, a fast-paced, adaptive form of Contextual Design. Rapid CD is a hands-on guide for anyone who needs practical guidance on how to use the Contextual Design process and adapt it to tactical projects with tight timelines and resources. Read more >

Contextual Design: Defining Customer-Centered Systems By Hugh Beyer and Karen Holtzblatt Our book, Contextual Design: Defining Customer-Centered Systems, is used in design and HCI curricula at universities and conferences throughout the world. The book serves as a complete reference to Contextual Design, our customer-centered design process. It's a practical, hands-on guide for anyone interested in designing systems that reflect the way customers do their work. Read more >

Design Columns

Latest Design Column

Diary of the Brand Switcher

By Karen Holtzblatt

What's the impact to your bottom line when your customers switch loyalty to your competitor? What if you could understand why and be able to prevent it? Read more >

More Design Columns >

Publications

Through our published work we've been a major player in moving the high-tech industry from engineering-driven to customer-centered design for all types of products and technologies.

Recent Publications

"Designing for the Mobile Device: Experiences, Challenges, and Methods"
Edited by Karen Holtzblatt

This special section in Communications of the ACM has articles by Karen Holtzblatt and several of our clients describing their experiences with real-world aspects of mobile application design. Download PDF >

Complete list of publications >

CDTools™

Give your team a tool — Increase acceptance of customer-centered design

CDTools is the first application designed to support customer-centered design. Its integrated module suite makes it easy to analyze, maintain, and share customer field data. Whoever you are — a team developing a commercial product, an IT shop designing an internal solution, or a consultancy designing for clients — CDTools solves the problem of efficiently and effectively taking full advantage of customer data needed for design. Find out more >

CDTools Resources

Real-life data and examples from actual projects that used Contextual Design to design a product or analyze a market. For each project you can access the team's data browser and see how they analyzed their customer data with their affinity diagram.

Shopping Data Browser

The data browser for the online grocery shopping product.