Context Driven Design talks

Context-driven design means designing with a clear understanding of the situations in which a product will be used: who uses it, where, when, with what devices and under what constraints. The same feature can succeed in one context and fail in another.

For UX and product teams, context is what turns general solutions into fitting ones. Understanding the environment, goals and limitations of users through research helps avoid designs that work in the studio but not in real life, and makes it possible for products to adapt to the people using them.

The three talks here span 2013 to 2018. Tania Douglas’s TED talk To design better tech, understand context (2018) argues that technology must be designed for the setting it will be used in. Kathy Sierra’s Badass: Making Users Awesome (Mind the Product, 2016) focuses on what makes users successful, and Robert Scoble’s The Age of Context (NEXT Network, 2013) looks at context-aware technology.