Karen Holtzblatt, CEO and Co-founder of InContext, is the visionary
behind InContext's unique customer-centered design approach,
Contextual Design. Karen's combination of technological and
psychological expertise provides the creative framework for driving
the development, innovative designs, and design processes.
Recognized as a leader in requirements and design, Karen has
pioneered transformative ideas and design approaches throughout her
career. Most recently, Karen initiated the Cool Project to explore
users' experience of cool products. The November issue of
Interactions showcases the core factors affecting the cool user
experience in the cover story, What Makes Things Cool?
Karen introduced Contextual Inquiry, now the industry standard for
gathering field data to understand how technology impacts the way
people work. Contextual Inquiry and the design processes based on
it provide a revolutionary approach for designing new products and
systems based on a deep understanding of the context of use.
Contextual Inquiry forms the base of Contextual Design, InContext's
full customer-centered design process.
Karen co-founded InContext Design in 1992 to use Contextual Design
techniques to coach product teams and deliver market data and
design solutions to businesses across multiple industries. The
books, Contextual Design: Defining Customer Centered Systems and
Rapid Contextual Design, are used by companies and universities
worldwide. As a member of ACM CHI (the association for
computer-human interaction), Karen was awarded membership to the
CHI Academy, a gathering of significant contributors, and received
the first Lifetime Award for Practice, presented to her in 2010,
for her impact on the field.
Karen has more than 25 years of teaching experience, both
professionally and in university settings. She holds a doctorate in
applied psychology from the University of Toronto.
Hugh Beyer has more than 20 years of experience building and
designing applications, systems, and tools. He is co-founder of
InContext Design, a user-centered design firm using Contextual
Design's user-centered techniques to deliver data and design
solutions with client teams across multiple industries. Hugh has
designed solutions in the automotive, health care, security, call
center, financial, and insurance industries.
Hugh provides the technical expertise and Agile know-how behind
InContext's offerings. He works closely with clients' engineering
and design teams to mesh often opposing points of view and build
innovative solutions in virtually any development environment.
Hugh's extensive understanding of the unique and varied
capabilities of a wide range of technical platforms enables
InContext to design innovative solutions. Hugh also works directly
with InContext's design teams and coaches client teams in the
Contextual Design process. He has pioneered the integration of
customer-centered techniques into traditional development, using
them to supercharge the Rational Unified Process, object-oriented
design, and Agile. Hugh is the co-author of Contextual Design:
Defining Customer Centered Systems which is used by companies and
universities worldwide. Hugh's latest publication is User-Centered
Agile Methods, which bridges the gap between the Agile development
and UX communities.
Before co-founding InContext, Hugh acted as lead developer and
architect in a range of systems at Digital Equipment Corp. His
domains of experience include object-oriented repositories,
databases, and integrated software development environments. Since
starting InContext, Hugh has overseen the design of applications
from desktop to Web to mobile, and from enterprise to small
business to consumers in the wide variety of industries supported
by InContext.
He holds a B.S. degree in applied mathematics from Harvard.
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