Contextual Design: Defining Customer-Centered Systems (Interactive Technologies),   ISBN:9781558604117

Customer Rating: 

I will review this product from its material standpoint and not from an implementation standpoint. The book was part of a class I took in Carnegie Mellon. It makes for a fascinating read. Some of the topics are excellent food for thought for human/user centric design of software products. The class assignments involved mock implementations of the concepts described in the book which was fun.
Coming from an embedded world, I haven't had a chance to implement these ideas in my day to day work but if I ever work on a user centric product, I hope to try some of the ideas.
Good read.

Customer Rating: 

The authors aren't really suggesting anything new. If you can do KJ analysis, you pretty much have this methodology nailed down. The book details a framework within which to assess what can be learned through observation and contextual inquiry (shadowing). The presentation can be somewhat redundant.
While I recommend contextual inquiry to analysts as it is presented here, I most certainly wouldn't recommend their ensuiong design process. It has many holes and there are better already-existing methods to complete the design process.

Customer Rating: 

If you've got a memory like a gold fish this might be a great book. For others this book is likely to be repetative to the extreme. Half of the pages could easily be cut out. The same message gets repeated over and over again. Many of the ideas are great but.. for many people out there time is a limiting factor, thats my largest issue with both the book and the method in general.

Customer Rating: 

This book provided a method to gather requirement efficiently but the rest of the method should be revised.

Customer Rating: 

Beyer & Holtzblatt have done an excellent job describing the process of contextual design. I'm currently implementing a new company-wide business process, in conjunction with co-workers, and thought it would simply be a good idea to both refresh my memory, gather ideas, and form concepts that would be helpful in the organizational design process. This book has undoubtedly served the purposes I've wanted it to. Again, excellent book - worth the buy.