How Does Contextual Design Impact the Overall User Experience?
How Does Contextual Design Impact
Contextual Design is the process of designing user interface elements based on users’ natural environments, their cultural norms, and the tasks they want to accomplish. It is an essential part of the human-centered design (HCD) approach to product development. It helps designers better understand the way people work and their mental models of information structures. This enables them to design digital products that align with users’ cultural, physical, and emotional states to make their interactions feel more natural and seamless.
The Contextual Design process is often coupled with other methodologies for gathering customer requirements, such as the Agile software development framework, to provide a full picture of how the end user will interact with the product. This enables developers to prioritize user stories and deliver functionality that addresses real customer needs.
Throughout the Contextual Design process, teams should come together to discuss and interpret their findings and observations. Workshop exercises such as affinity mapping can help team members find common themes in their qualitative data and establish a vision for the project’s direction. This can be particularly helpful for teams with diverse backgrounds and perspectives, as it can ensure that all members are on the same page about what the results of their field research mean for the design of an application.
How Does Contextual Design Impact the Overall User Experience?
When the contextual inquiry sessions have been completed, the design team should be prepared to begin implementing their findings. For small projects, this might be as simple as using the results to guide the layout of an app’s navigation menu or re-working the location and design of button labels. For enterprise-scale projects, the context design team may have to coordinate with multiple business functions to identify the most important problems to solve, prioritize their roll out, and ensure that engineering tradeoffs do not degrade the usability of the system.
Once the contextual inquiry interviews have been conducted, the research results are analyzed and interpreted by a team of researchers and designers. These insights are then used to inform the design process through paper prototypes, User Environment Design, and storyboards. The final design will be a clear and concise representation of the end user’s experience, and will include all of the necessary functions needed to complete their task.
UI/UX Designers can use the knowledge gathered through Contextual Design to further refine the design through iterations until they achieve the desired outcome. By incorporating the findings from contextual inquiries into the design process, developers can elevate user experiences and pacify user pain points before they become too intense to resolve. This is a critical advantage of Contextual Design that is not always possible with other data-driven approaches such as analytics tools or heat map tracking. The insights gathered through the first-hand method of contextual inquiry are more reliable than the data obtained from other sources, and can give developers confidence in their understanding of their customers’ needs. Ultimately, this can save time and money when the final product is delivered to the customer.