Rapid Contextual Design

Chapter 1 Introduction

This handbook is a how-to companion to the main Contextual Design book, Contextual Design: Defining Customer-Centered Systems.¹ Over the years, we at InContext² have worked on many projects of many types, with many teams in many different organizations. Contextual Design (CD), our customer-centered design process, has been used in many ways depending on the needs of the project. Contextual Design often has been called a scaffolding for user-centered front-end design—techniques can be used or skipped and different techniques can be added.

Rapid Contextual Design is a guide for practitioners of the most frequently used CD techniques. Like any new process adoption, certain techniques are adopted first and others come later. ...