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Context Mapping

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How to Define Context for Product Designers. Ami Ben David is the co-founder of EverythingMe.

How to Define Context for Product Designers

A seasoned veteran with experience as a founder, an executive and a VC, Ami is in charge of EverythingMe’s marketing and strategy. Everybody in tech is suddenly talking about context. In his TED interview, Larry Page talks about context as the future of computing; Marissa Mayer is rumored to be building a home grown contextual search engine; Twitter just acquired a contextual team; and Samsung is getting into the contextual game as well.

There have been various attempts to define context, but I want to focus on contextual mobile product design. This is important because context is a revolution in the way we design mobile products. ContextMapping, design research. Research for inspiration. Contextmapping tools are varied, and include tools that were previously thought to be the domain of professional designers, including visioning tools, visual thinking tools, but also traditional research tools as observations and interview.

research for inspiration

Using the tools calls upon the design and research skills of users and researchers. Contextmapping is a procedure for conducting contextual research with users, where tacit knowledge is gained about the context of use of products. It aims to inform and inspire design teams, where users and stakeholders actively participate in the design process to ensure a good fit between the design and the use of a product.

User research

Personas. Metaphors. Mental models. User behavior. User stories.