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Reviewer: Stephen J. Tauber

A customer working within a system performs tasks, creates and uses artifacts, lives within a culture, and pursues certain goals. The major thesis of this book is that a system meant for a customer must support the customer's business (individually or as a segment of the marketplace) in all salient aspects. A well-designed system supports tasks within the overall context, avoiding point solutions and stovepipes. The authors have many years of experience: Holtzblatt, trained in applied psychology, is the key individual behind the contextual inquiry approach for gathering valid, representative, and usable data from customers; Beyer brings a deep understanding of environments, repositories, and architectures to the work. The authors define contextual design as an approach that integrates multiple customer-centered techniques into a process for conceiving and planning a system. The book is a well-structured, generally well-written, and lucid explanation of their methodology. This methodology stresses what the customers (roughly equivalent to users) do and intend, what they might do in the future, and how to design a system that is adapted to all of its customers. Data gathering, interpretation via several types of models, consolidation, informed innovation, and validation are all parts of the methodology. Notably, actual implementation is left as an exercise for the reader; it is adequately discussed in the usual system engineering works. The methodology was devised and refined in the context of software and hardware systems. It would, however, be equally applicable to the systems design of factory layouts or consumer durable goods. The contextual design model of working eschews horse trading (“I'll go along with you on this if you accept that”), compromise (allow all plausible alternatives), and guruism (just go along with the recognized expert). It defines procedures for using actual data to select among alternatives, roles for the team members at the several stages, and procedures for focusing discussion. The design team should include appropriate technologists and customers spanning the roles within the customer community. The book is organized into six major parts. “Understanding the Customer” deals with gathering data about the customer's work practices and artifacts and interpreting the data to elucidate the customer's intents. “Seeing Work” discusses the construction and use of flow, sequence, artifact, cultural, and physical models. “Seeing across Customers” deals with consolidating the models and communicating their substance and implications to the customer community. “Innovation from Data” discusses how to use the data to drive the system design. “System Design” emphasizes coherence and human factors when considering how the customers will use the system. Finally, “Prototyping” is based on paper charts and movable sticky notes (not on software and screens). Contextual design is widely applicable, but details must be adapted to the organization and the specifics of the project. There are about 100 references, just under half of which are also listed by topic as “Readings and Resources,” and only one of which is to work by the authors. The level of detail and coverage in the index seem appropriate. The illustrations are straightforward and unpretentious, and are used to illustrate specific concepts, not as embellishments. Some shading, unfortunately, is so dark that part of the text is barely discernible. There are a few other minor infelicities, including a figure caption appearing on a page separate from the figure and the use of “between” instead of “among” and “criteria” for “criterion.” Some of the later chapters are noticeably more verbose and redundant than the earlier ones; the section on prototyping is again more crisp and direct. In sum, this is a worthwhile book for both practitioners and students.