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1 insights services our work contextual design publications about us Welcome At InContext Design, we infuse insight into your products and organization. Everything we do is driven by a deep understanding of your customer. We help you invent. We Understand We Design We Measure InContext featured in FORTUNE magazine InContext presenting at CHI 2014 Design Webinars Hosted by InContext Upcoming Events InContext at CHI 2014 Cool Workshop January 6th March Stanford University A course on understanding women s experience in high-tech industires April 26th May 1st in Toronto A conference about computer-human interaction, innovation and modern design theory Boston UXPA Conference Design Webinars May in boston A conference about computer-human interaction, innovation and modern design theory April 26th May 1st in Toronto A conference about computer-human interaction, innovation and modern design theory Design Insights from the Incontext Staff Know you are building the right thing II Thursday, Dec 5th, 2013 How do you guarantee success? Use a structured technique that has been used by teams over many years and taught in many Universities around the world. Did you miss Part 1 of our video series? Part 1 focused on the idea that we all want a successful product. [Read more] Innovation by Design Sunday, Dec 1st, 2013 Do you want to transform your products for the next generation of users and platforms? Our Cool Project a multi-year field research effort reveals what makes technology products compelling. We now understand why users just can t stop talking about how their cool products impact their lives and create delight. [Read more] Transforming the Business of Law Saturday, Nov 2nd, 2013 Nothing is better than helping our clients be successful; it s the proverbial icing on the cake when they receive industry recognition. So we re pleased that TyMetrix is featured in an episode of Innovations with Ed Begley, Jr. on Fox Business Television. Innovations is an information-based TV series... [Read more] View all design posts > Get Directions Contact Us Building Address Mailing Address Phone 36 Knox Trail 2352 Main Street Inquiries Acton, MA Concord, MA admin@incontextdesign.com or Let us contact you

2 Services Let us help you with your challenges. We tailor our services to your problem, your team, your business goals, your schedule, and your budget Understand your Customer Our approach to user research is time-tested by major and small companies across many industries. Let us help you develop a clear product direction through in-depth understanding of how your market works and what they need. For us, innovation isn t an accident it s built in to our methods. We can work with your team to develop new ideas and directions, tested and validated with users. Design for Innovation Measure When you need hard numbers, we can give them to you. Our survey methods have been tested and validated with consumers around the world we can use them to tell you where your product is weak and what to do to improve it. Create Modern Interaction Design Let us help create that WOW customer experience you are longing for > Define Interaction Patterns Let us help create that WOW customer experience you are longing for > Do Great Visual Design Let us help create that WOW customer experience you are longing for > Prototype Designs Let us help create that WOW customer experience you are longing for > Evaluate with Cool Metrics How is your product doing? What can you do to improve? We measure Cooll > Use Heuristic Reviews How is your product doing? What can you do to improve? We measure Cooll > Training and Workshops Corporate Talks real result you can act on now. Try one of these or let us build a custom workshop for you > real result you can act on now. Try one of these or let us build a custom workshop for you > Innovation Courses Design Webinars real result you can act on now. Try one of these or let us build a custom workshop for you > real result you can act on now. Try one of these or let us build a custom workshop for you > Contact Us Building Address Mailing Address Phone or Let us contact you 36 Knox Trail Acton, MA Main Street Concord, MA Inquiries admin@incontextdesign.com

3 Our Work See what industries we work with and how we can help you innovate Industries we work with Business Systems Consumer Products Medical Systems Software Systems Financial Management Website and Community Building Enterprise and CRM Developer Tools Education Manufacturing Support Contact Us Building Address 36 Knox Trail Acton, MA Mailing Address 2352 Main Street Concord, MA Phone Inquiries or Let us contact you

4 About We are a team of entrepeneurial thinkers, designers, and doers. Nice to meet you We use Contextual Design to define innovative, customer-centered product concepts, hardware/software solutions, business systems, websites, and consumer goods. Our field data provides rich market characterizations and personas to help you understand the needs of your user population. Our design process ensures that your user interface designs and overall user experience is designed with customer data. And, we deliver training services in our Contextual Design methodology for your teams. 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, tasks, intents, and processes in order to design products that meet both users and business needs. Karen and Hugh founded InContext in Since that time, we have worked with leaders and startups from a range of industries, including automotive, business systems, consumer electronics, developer systems, education, enterprise and CRM applications, insurance, medical devices and information, mobile devices, professional information and services. retail websites, software for devices, and telecommunications. 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, is considered a classic and is used in design and human-computer interaction (HCI) curricula at universities, as well as in companies, throughout the world. Our second book, Rapid Contextual Design, gained widespread use as a practical, hands-on guide to using Contextual Design. Our monograph User-Centered Agile Methods explains how to bridge the gap between the Agile development and UX communities 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. Karen Holtzblatt is the founder & CEO of InContext Since I started working with computers back in the 80 s, I ve had a passion for integrating user research with innovative design. In fact, the first challenge I was given was to transform the usability studies of the time into a truly innovative method and Contextual Design was the result. It s been a long and rewarding journey since then, helping our clients to design better products, work better together, and have fun doing it! I m looking forward to the next 10 years, when mobile devices and apps will complete the transformation they have already started to make in our lives. Hugh Beyer is the co-founder & CTO of InContext 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.

5 Contextual Design Our process was developed through years of research and understanding consumer patterns and insights What is Contextual Design?

6 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, systems, and technologies. Contextual Design by Karen Holtzblatt and Hugh Beyer September 15th, 1997 Morgan Kaufmann Publishers; ISBN: This is a practical, hands-on guide for anyone trying to design systems that reflects the way customers want to do their work. The authors developed Contextual Design, the method discussed here, through their work with teams struggling to design products and internal systems. In this book, you ll find the underlying principles of the method and how to apply them to different problems, constraints, and organizational situations. The foremost experts on contextual inquiry have packed what they know into a book of substance and intelligence... If you care about your customers and want to understand what they need, then you need this book. Larry Constantine, Principal Consultant, Constantine & Lockwood, Ltd.; Professor of Computing Sciences, University of Technology, Sydney, Australia Rapid Contextual Design by Karen Holtzblatt and Hugh Beyer September 15th, 1997 Morgan Kaufmann Publishers; ISBN: This is a practical, hands-on guide for anyone trying to design systems that reflects the way customers want to do their work. The authors developed Contextual Design, the method discussed here, through their work with teams struggling to design products and internal systems. In this book, you ll find the underlying principles of the method and how to apply them to different problems, constraints, and organizational situations. The foremost experts on contextual inquiry have packed what they know into a book of substance and intelligence... If you care about your customers and want to understand what they need, then you need this book. Larry Constantine, Principal Consultant, Constantine & Lockwood, Ltd.; Professor of Computing Sciences, University of Technology, Sydney, Australia User-Centered Agile Methods by Karen Holtzblatt and Hugh Beyer September 15th, 1997 Morgan Kaufmann Publishers; ISBN: This is a practical, hands-on guide for anyone trying to design systems that reflects the way customers want to do their work. The authors developed Contextual Design, the method discussed here, through their work with teams struggling to design products and internal systems. In this book, you ll find the underlying principles of the method and how to apply them to different problems, constraints, and organizational situations. The foremost experts on contextual inquiry have packed what they know into a book of substance and intelligence... If you care about your customers and want to understand what they need, then you need this book. Larry Constantine, Principal Consultant, Constantine & Lockwood, Ltd.; Professor of Computing Sciences, University of Technology, Sydney, Australia Other Written Works Books Co-authored by InContext Designing Composite Applications By Jörg Beringer and Karen Holtzblatt Galileo Press (SAP Press); InContext s Karen Holtzblatt and SAP s Jörg Beringer are the co-authors of a book that developers plus anyone involved with enterprise application design and usability/quality management will want to read. Designing Composite Applications discusses using the SAP Enterprise Service Architecture toolset and Contextual Design and shares exclusive insights on design processes based on SAP s Business Process Platform. You ll also learn valuable tricks and techniques that can drastically improve user productivity. view more > Books with Chapters by InContext Scenarios, Stories, Use Cases: Through the Systems Development Life-Cycle Edited by Ian Alexander and Neil Maiden John Wiley & Sons: NY, This book includes a chapter by Karen Holtzblatt, Role of Scenarios in Contextual Design. The Human-Computer Interaction Handbook: Fundamentals, Evolving Technologies and Emerging Applications Edited by Julie A. Jacko and Andrew Sears Lawrence Erlbaum Associates: Mahwah, NJ, This handbook has a chapter by Karen Holtzblatt, Contextual Design. Field Methods for Software and Systems Design Edited by Dennis Wixon and Judith Ramey John Wiley & Sons, Inc.: NY, A good resource for anyone wanting to adopt customer-centered methods in his or her own organization, this book includes chapters describing the experience of several different practitioners using field methods. Various people who have used Contextual Inquiry and Contextual Design including Beyer and Holtzblatt have written chapters describing their experiences. References and Articles. Numerous articles on Contextual Design have appeared in referenced journals, books on user-centered design, and websites. They include: What Makes Things Cool? ACM interactions (Nov. 2011) This cover story introduces InContext s research into what makes someone describe a product as cool and the key constructs uncovered as core to the user experience of cool. Customer-Centered Design for Mobile Applications Personal and Ubiquitous Computing (May 2005), Issue: Volume 9, No 4 This article describes InContext s experience using customer-centered design to create a mobile application for sports fans, and how we modified Contextual Design to produce the application. Designing for the Mobile Device: Experiences, Challenges, and Methods Edited by Karen Holtzblatt Communications of the ACM, T. S. Balaji, K. Holtzblatt, E. Kangas, J. Kates, T. Kinnunen, B. Landers, C. Page, B. Moritz, J. Bloom, J. Chipcase, J. Lehikoinen, D. Rondeau. Volume 48, No 7, July 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 An Agile Customer-Centered Method: Rapid Contextual Design By Lisa Baker, Hugh Beyer, and Karen Holtzblatt XP Agile Universe 2004 Proceedings, August 2004, Calgary, Alberta, Canada. This paper describes how a user-centered design method such as Contextual Design naturally fits with Agile development methods and recounts our experience with combining the two. Download xapps-a New Practice for Next Practice By Joerg Berringer and Karen Holtzblatt SAP Design Guild Edition 7 (Nov. 2003) xapps are composite applications, designed to define next practices. This article describes how composite applications drive business process and work practice innovation using concepts from Contextual Design view more > Featured Articles InContext at years is a long time in the world of technology. When Karen started her initial work in Human-Computer Interaction, the interaction we were talking about was English-language command lines for the EVE editor at Digital Equipment Corporation. Most software at the time crunched numbers, filled in forms, or processed commands. EVE was revolutionary because you [ ] Methods in Collision and Hugh Beyer Products are produced by using a process the way people organize themselves to get things done. Whether it is a formal process with a name or just the habits of working that get built up in a culture, nothing is produced without some kind of way of doing things. Companies are always looking for [ ] Welcome to InnovationInCool Come see our new site at When Apple came out with the iphone in 2007 it was a game-changing product. Everybody was talking about it, even those not flocking to AT&T. People at parties gathered around the phone to watch the pinch, the swivel, the pictures, and the games. The technology industry, including our [ ] Beyond the Tower of Babel The sad news about product design is that it requires people to make and ship products. Products, systems, cars, medical devices, games, even apps all require the work of many coordinating people. First, we have the development team; then add in marketing, product management, and testing; top with user-centered design roles: user interface, user research, user [...] view more >

7 Insights We share our views and experience across a broad range of topics. Read what the InContext staff is thinking about. Know you are building the right thing II Thursday, Dec 5th, 2013 Innovation by Design InContext featured in FORTUNE magazine Thursday, Dec 5th, 2013 Sunday, Dec 1st, 2013 Sort by Topic Sort by Author Business Development, Innovations, Tymetrix Transforming the Business of Law Sort by Title Saturday, Nov 2nd, 2013 Nothing is better than helping our clients be successful; it s the proverbial icing on the cake when they receive industry recognition. So we re pleased that TyMetrix is featured in an episode of Innovations with Ed Begley, Jr. on Fox Business Television. Innovations is an information-based TV series geared toward educating the public on the latest [Read more] Contextual Design, Contextual Inquiry, Educational Videos Know you are building the right thing III Thursday, Jan 30th, 2014 Often times, we don t know where to begin. Start with understanding your customers. Contextual Inquiry is the first step of Contextual Design, it s here where we understand the customer s behaviors and the issues they face by speaking directly with them. Did you miss Part 2 of our video series? Click here to see [Read more] Interaction Design, Innovation, Business Development InContext featured in FORTUNE Magazine By Kelley Wagg Thursday, Sep 12th, 2013 FORTUNE has published an interview with Karen about our work with General Motors, Creating an ipad experience on four wheels. FORTUNE discusses how GM turned to InContext Design to help create its new flagship in-vehicle computer system.[read more] TOPICS Contextual Design Cool Metrics Business Development Innovation Visioning Agile Development Design Process Interaction Design InContext Webinars InContext Videos AUTHORS Karen Holtzblatt Hugh Beyer Kelley Wagg David Rondeau Shelley Wood Samara Watkiss Larry Marturano Traci Lepore David Flotree TITLE Finding a product s cool... Know you are building...iii Know you are building... II Innovation by design Transforming the business... Cool Metrics, Innovation, Contextual Design Finding a Product s Cool Factor Tuesday, February 11th, 2014 Check out my latest article Finding a Product s Cool Factor published in the Wall Street Journal, and find out what the key factors in a cool product are. We can help you apply our Cool Concepts and design principles to your products. [Read more] Cool Metrics, Innovation, Contextual Design Finding a Product s Cool Factor Tuesday, February 11th, 2014 Check out my latest article Finding a Product s Cool Factor published in the Wall Street Journal, and find out what the key factors in a cool product are. We can help you apply our Cool Concepts and design principles to your products. [Read more] Scroll to View More