"Contextual Usability"? Options

[RonZ]

Maybe it's just because I no longer attend the conferences or even the local meetings, but I recently ran into the phrase "contextual usability" as in the wikipedia article. Can anyone comment?

[bragadocchio]

I took a look at the editing history of the article at wikipedia, which had significantly more information about the original source of the document:

Contextual Usability - Supplementing product and consumer intelligence with use intelligence (from Nicoll, D.W. (1997) ‘Contextual Usability - Supplementing product and consumer intelligence with use intelligence’ Increasing information intensity: towards ‘intelligent’ products - Working Paper No.4 Edinburgh: Design Council and The University of Edinburgh Management School - Creative Commons licence)

Derek William Nicoll TechMaPP The University of Edinburgh Management School

Here's another paper from the author, from April, 2006, which also explains Contextual Usability:
Television and the experiential fabric of the ‘domestic’ and the ‘everyday’ (pdf)

[AbleReach]

From another pdf: http://www.sagepub.com/upm-data/5856_Chapt...Final_Pdf_3.pdf

CONTEXTUAL USABILITY
Contextual usability studies generally are oriented toward observing respondents interacting with technology or other tools in their own environments. Respondents may be encouraged to demonstrate how they use
their own computers to navigate particular Web sites or handle their soft-ware programs.

From Hy Mariampolski's Ethnography for Marketers: A Guide to Consumer Immersion

Another quote, from Bill's pdf link:

One thing relates to another, and understanding relationships helps us build usablility into navigation strategies.

A physical life example of a "contextual" relationship might be my counter top bread machine, which was designed to be short enough to slide under the upper cabinets in most kitchens. Bread and kitchen cabinets are not related. In context, kitchen appliance usability is related to the the kitchen environment.

In short, functional rocks.

OT, or is it? - First time I've noticed this. The book title above is linked to an amazon.com page.
Under the Explore: Books on Related Topics | Concordance, the concordance link leads to a tag cloud of the 100 most frequently used words in the book. What a cool way to expand user search terms!

This post has been edited by AbleReach: Jun 1 2006, 07:07 AM

[DCrx]

Sounds a bit like the Japanese three actuals approach. How "context" got to be an innovative new thing to tack on underscores the triumph of reductionism in western thought. Reductionism can be a useful tool -- if you don't get greedy with it.

[RonZ]

Thanks for the info. That pretty much confirmed my guess: a phrase used by different people to mean different things. It certainly sounds impressive though.

[AbleReach]

Conceptually oriented research is rife with invented terminology - a language within a language. At some point in perceptual sciences a researcher makes up a term to describe a phenomenon, after which the phenomenon becomes countable.

The qualifier of "contextual" is a little nudge towards seeing usability as a multifaceted thing.

Genuine contextual usability may be a path past that 20th of a second blink when viewers form a first impression of a web site. At that speed what is judged is pre-thought, like an instinct about body language. Is anything out of place? Would you trust this site in a dark alley? With your wallet? Your daughter's wallet? Is this a good site for cutting edge games, online banking, wine reviews or peer-reviewed science? What works for one won't fly for another. It's contextual.

Blow "contextual," and other considerations like being easy to learn and use, usefulness, satisfaction, memorability and (ka-ching) ROI won't make it in the door.

[DCrx]

Good stuff, that context. Good enough to have a page about context and contextual inquiry on my site.

Mostly, context is at a polar opposite from where we are today. We are trying to split style from content, and everything from everything else. The drive is for the web to become the ultimate reductionist playground, a kind of chop-shop....

One of the most practical yet ultimately counter-productive trends is toward the re-use of content, which usually means structuring eText content so that each chunk of data in it and each aspect of it can be extracted from its original form and redeployed in another context using dynamic publishing. This reductionist approach essentially treats the code of language as simply a quantifiable mass of data that can be carved up without losing any intrinsic value, i.e. the sum of its parts is greater than the whole.
-- eText: In the beginning was the word... by Garth A. Buchholz

Thus content management has become, like everything tech related, the management of data. For information technology (a special use of the word information as different from data) you need context management. And context management isn't on the development path of the CMS.

For a usability person to understand the context for the task has always been important. Understanding context may mean much more than streamlining task completion. It may mean the entire task can be eliminated, the quintessence of usability.

So far, Gladwell's Blink has been a perfect companion to the Don't Make Me Think school of usability. What many, if not most, of the people who like Blink fail to note...

I'm very interested in figuring out those kinds of situations where we need to be careful with our powers of rapid cognition. For instance, I have a chapter where I talk a lot about what it means for a man to be tall. I called up several hundred of the Fortune 500 companies in the U.S. and asked them how tall their CEOs were. And the answer is that they are almost all tall. Now that's weird. There is no correlation between height and intelligence, or height and judgment, or height and the ability to motivate and lead people. But for some reason corporations overwhelmingly choose tall people for leadership roles. I think that's an example of bad rapid cognition: there is something going on in the first few seconds of meeting a tall person which makes us predisposed toward thinking of that person as an effective leader, the same way that the police looked at my hair and decided I resembled a criminal. I call this the "Warren Harding Error" (you'll have to read "Blink" to figure out why)
-- Designs For Working; Malcolm Gladwell, The New Yorker

It might shock the readers of Blink to note this last bit of context supplied in this article by Gladwell, "With "Blink," I'm trying to help people distinguish their good rapid cognition from their bad rapid cognition." Of course, as with everything, it is only others who have faulty thin-slicing cognition, while ours is always pretty good.

This post has been edited by DCrx: Jun 4 2006, 07:06 AM

[busybeingborn]

Speaking of invented terminolgy "Intelligent Inconsistency" is what I call "Contextual Usability."

This came to the fore a few years ago for me as I started to experiment with navigational structures that were not persistent to see if there would any negative result or positive results.

Bottom line: In my research most navigation did not have to be persistent and/or consistent in location. color, size, etc. It could be inconsistent as long as it was intelligently applied to the user's goals and within their focus. Hence, "Intelligent Inconsistency" was coined (by Mark Hurst) and the long held beliefs of many (including my own) were shattered. Good times...