Contextual Design

By Karen Holtzblatt, Hugh Beyer,

Book cover of Contextual Design: Design for Life

Book description

Contextual Design: Design for Life, Second Edition, describes the core techniques needed to deliberately produce a compelling user experience. Contextual design was first invented in 1988 to drive a deep understanding of the user into the design process. It has been used in a wide variety of industries and taught…

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Why read it?

1 author picked Contextual Design as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

This book is the software industry’s “bible” on how to start software development projects. 

It explains how to conduct up-front user research, before design, prototyping, and coding start. User research, followed by analysis of your findings, is how you determine requirements and figure out what features or improvements are needed and which are most important. 

This book presents a collection of methods for doing that. You probably won’t need every method described this book on every project, but having Holtzblatt and Beyer’s toolkit of user-research and analysis methods available when needed is valuable. 

I read it several times, and…

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