Abstract
This paper is part of a panel about user research methods and how they are applied to the benefit of products. The method of contextual research is discussed, and three case studies from the public sector are illustrating how contextual research has been driving product development. Contextual research is part of field study methods and used when exploring the context of usage of a product or service, or the cultural context. It is applied when users' tasks are involving other people or processes which need to be observed to fully understand users' needs and goals. The concept of contextual research has been developed by Holtzblatt and Beyer and for the first time completely described in 1995. The case studies from the Ministry of Justice, from Greater Manchester Transport, and the Blue Badge project are showing why this method is so important for successful product development. Especially when designing services which are involving various user groups interacting with each other, combining offline and online tasks, or when developing B2B tools embedded in processes in the office, research in context is necessary.
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Duda, S., Warburton, C., Black, N. (2020). Contextual Research. In: Kurosu, M. (eds) Human-Computer Interaction. Design and User Experience. HCII 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12181. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49059-1_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49059-1_3
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