Context Is King

What can we learn from a street musician flopping in front of a busy commuter crowd in Washington D.C.? Tons, if that musician happens to be Joshua Bell, recipient of the Avery Fisher Prize.

On January 12th, 2007, the Washington Post set Bell in a busy commuter station as a street musician to see how the crowd would react to having one of the greatest classical musicians on earth delivering a free concert to no one in particular. The resulting article's findings are astounding.

Bell was virtually ignored.

Aside from this being a fascinating cultural experiment, there is an excellent lesson embedded within it that designers of any ilk should heed: context matters more than you would like to believe. In one setting Bell can fill halls with people who gladly pay hundreds of dollars to see him and stifle their coughs in reverence to his craft. In another, more than 1000 people pass him by without even the slightest acknowledgment.

No matter how good your idea is and no matter how well you execute on it, if you get the context wrong you will miss your audience entirely. Like Bell, this will be hard for you to stomach because the mastery of your craft is no different between the varying contexts, only the environment has changed. Because of this it is tempting to blame the commuters for their cultural ineptitude, just as it is tempting to blame users for not fully understanding our systems.

Accounting for context is, and should be, an integral part of understanding the user experience. If we are designing a mobile application, we must be aware not only of the diminished screen space, but also of the environments users may be in. These environments may cause them to only use one hand, only have half an eye available, or may require them to operate the application blindly. If we don't take these factors into account, even the sexiest, most kickin' application ever put together falls flat.