Contextual techniques starter kit

A Introduction Are you trying to get more customer involvement in your development process, but aren't sure how to start? Do you want to learn more about your customers and how they work, but don't know the best way to approach them? Do you want to know the pitfalls to beware of and the techniques that have worked for others? If so, you're not alone. There's a lot of interest in becoming more responsive to customer needs these days, and a lot of people are trying to figure out how to introduce new, customer-centered approaches into their organizations. Organizational inertia, the doubts of your peers, the simple uncertainty of knowing what's reasonable in a new and unfamiliar domain— these are all barriers to trying something new. At CHI '96 in Vancouver, more than 100 people came together to help address this problem. In our third annual Special Interest Group (SIG) on contextual techniques, we grouped experts and novices into teams and had them identify key techniques, issues, and pitfalls in gathering and using customer data in real engineering projects. We captured this broad range of experience and organized it so that others could benefit from what these practitioners had learned. We used a simplified version of an affinity diagram to collect all this knowledge—listing each point on its own note-card and grouping the notes by topic. The groupings below capture some of the flavor of the original affinity, as well as organizing the content. Use this guide as an idea sourcebook, stimulus, and motivator to get more customer data into your own design process. It's a collection of ideas from some of the best people in the industry , showing what others have done successfully and what you could do too. If you're already getting customers involved in your projects , use the ideas to expand your activities. We hope you'll find the guide informative and useful. It should give you a good jump start on getting customers involved in design. • Customers and management want it • Project is not mission critical • Development team ready to try new things • Project is bounded, with clear focus and few dependencies • Easy to get to the users Who should we talk to? • Go for different people, not similar people • Start with the heavy users first • Start with the people you think will be the biggest customers …