Are you often responsible for choosing and implementing user-centred design methodologies for interactive systems such as websites? If the answer is no, you probably won’t find this book – or this review – very interesting. If the answer is yes, however, read on…
Rapid Contextual Design is not intended to engage or inspire, especially during the extremely dry first few chapters. It is a textbook, a detailed process manual for a design methodology. This makes the book difficult to review without reviewing the methodology itself. So throughout this review I’m going to focus more on Rapid CD than on the prose stylings of its authors.
Before I do that, though, here’s a comment about the book’s structure: the chapter on planning Rapid CD projects, which appears right at the beginning, should be moved to the back. It refers obliquely to concepts that have yet to be introduced, so makes little sense to the first-time reader. I recommend that first-time readers bypass this altogether. You can always revisit it when you find yourself planning a real-life project.
Now, on to the Rapid CD methodology. I heard that a London UX Book Club attendee had called it a “cargo cult of Post-It notes”, a description that’s both funny and apt. Rapid CD certainly involves a lot of Post-Its and a lot of wall space. Just reading the textbook gives you a sense of weariness as the number of Post-It notes expands geometrically along with the wall space needed to host them all. At one point I found myself thinking that it simply wasn’t suitable for small-ish agencies like my own, especially in big cities where office space is expensive and meeting rooms in high demand. The logistical and spatial demands made by “pure” Rapid CD are daunting.
But as with any methodology, Rapid CD can be adopted flexibly. If you’re happy to be pragmatic you can take some of its more useful aspects and drop others. For me, the most valuable aspect of Rapid CD is the contextual interview process and the way in which observations from the interviews are shared, socialised and consolidated. I’m currently in the process of using this technique on a large-scale project and am happy with the results so far.
Another key Rapid CD activity is paper prototyping. The last few years have seen a shift towards using software such as Axure and Balsamiq for low-fi prototyping, so paper prototyping has become a bit of a lost art: not many UX practitioners make use of it, and modern perceptions of the technique are generally negative. But the Rapid CD approach to paper prototyping works, in my view, because it does not make the mistake of validating design decisions in the same way as an interactive, screen-based prototype does. Instead, paper prototyping in Rapid CD is geared towards involving the user in the design process.
Rather than aping usability tests, Rapid CD paper prototyping interviews are framed as collaborative design sessions where the user can modify and rearrange the prototype as they see fit. This doesn’t happen with screen-based prototypes, no matter how low-fi they are. If you want your users to be (and feel) actively involved in the design process, the Rapid CD paper prototyping technique is definitely worth considering. However you may find it difficult to sell to your clients if their previous experience of paper prototyping has been unsatisfactory.
If you need to have an understanding of published, thorough design methodologies as a part of your job, and you’re unfamiliar with Rapid CD (or its big brother, Contextual Design), I’d certainly recommend this book. It’s not a compelling page-turner and you may rarely, if ever, find yourself adopting the methodology wholesale. But as a process manual for a wide range of user-centred design activities it is more than sufficient. Just make sure you stock up on Post-It notes before putting it into practise!
