Understanding Context

Preface

A PREFACE CAN BE MANY THINGS; this preface is two things. First, it gives a practical introduction to what this book is and what you can learn from it. Second, it tells a personal story about my reasons for writing the book and what I hope it will mean to you.

The Practical Bit

This book is about how information shapes and changes the way people experience context in the products and services we design and build. It’s not only about how we design for a given context, but how design participates in making context. It begins with how people understand context in any environment. Then, it explores how language takes part in that understanding, and how information architecture helps to shape context, and to make it better. It’s also an exploration, where “understanding” is more verb than noun; it’s less about defining the right answers than discovering the right questions.

Context is an abstract idea, but it brings concrete challenges. What defines the “place” a customer is in, if he’s shopping “online” and “in a store” at the same time? What determines the boundaries of a user’s identity if her social network has multiple layers of privacy controls? How does a user know if something is a button and not just a label? What does it mean if you put something “in the cloud,” but it’s also “on your phone” and “in your laptop”? When we say we are “here” what does that actually mean now that we can be interacting and talking in many places at once? From accidentally hitting Reply All ...