Contextual Design (CD) is a systems design method developed by the authors that is in wide practice today. It enables interaction designers and software developers to: Gather detailed data about how people work and use systems; Develop a coherent picture of a whole customer population; Generate systems designs from a knowledge of customer work; Diagram a set of existing systems, showing their relationships, inconsistencies, redundancies, and omissions.
This workbook is a how-to companion to Contextual Design, and guides teams and project leaders in how to organize and run a field data collection project. The steps in the workbook are the first steps that most projects take when starting to use customer data. As such, it is relevant to anyone wanting to use field data for the purpose of product and system design. The workbook provides a day-to-day reference for running a data collection project guiding the project leaders through the decision-making and practical steps of a real project.

In addition, the workbook introduces CDTools, an application to help teams capture and organize the field data. The workbook acts as a complete guide to the tool use in the context of real project activities, but is by no means a required part of making the best use of the book.