Karen Holtzblatt is the inventor of Contextual Inquiry and with Hugh Beyer Contextual Design, the customer involvement process adopted by many companies and taught throughout the world. Contextual Design is a customer-centered design process that takes a cross-functional team from collecting data about users in the field, through interpretation and consolidation of that data, to the design of product or system concepts and a tested system structure.

Over the last 18 years the industry has moved from using an engineering-driven requirements and design process to a more user-centered process. Many now recognize that the best way to define the right product, business process, web site or other system is to involve users and user data at every step. And they are moving to integrate contextual techniques with other techniques like agile development, six sigma, business process redesign, and overall system's engineering. As a complete front end design process, Contextual Design can be used to drive user awareness into every aspect of product, system, and business process design.

In this talk Karen talks about how Contextual Design is changing to respond to new demands and discusses what design processes work and what doesn't work for different organizational structures, software development methodologies and design problems. She uses examples drawn from her wide experience working with development and design teams across the industry on design problems that span consumer and business applications, mobile and traditional platforms, and hundreds of work practices.