Summary: Understanding context of use, is the first starting point of any design decision. Repeatedly referencing actual user behavior or being insights-led is critical. Building this skill in your team is called ‘contextual intelligence’. It’s essential to good design decision-making.
Getting to Contextual Intelligence in Design Teams
“Always design a thing by considering it i its next larger context– a chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in an environment, an environment in a city plan”. -Eliel Saarinen was a Finnish-American architect who worked in art nouveau and city planning in the 20th century.
Eliel Saarinen’s quote—”Always design a thing by considering it in its next larger context”—is a timeless design principle. Whether you’re designing a chair or creating a digital experience, the context around the design shapes its success. In UX and Service Design, this thinking is more important than ever. Every button, screen, or service interaction doesn’t exist in isolation. It plays a role in a larger ecosystem.
Most teams lack contextual intelligence, or the ability to discern and interpret the context of use in a product, service, or experience decision.
UX Design: From Button to Ecosystem
Think about a single button on a website. At first glance, it seems simple. But its placement, color, and function only make sense when you understand the broader interface it’s part of. That interface sits within the user’s larger journey, often across multiple devices and touchpoints. Without understanding how each element fits into the bigger picture, the result is disjointed.
Consider Amazon: its “Buy Now” button isn’t just a feature; it’s part of a seamless purchasing flow that spans product research, recommendations, checkout, and delivery. It doesn’t function alone—it’s part of a deeply integrated ecosystem designed to reduce friction at every step.
Untold Truth: The first step is the most important part of an e-commerce flow (and any decision-supported experience you offer). Whether choosing healthcare, travel, banking products, or higher education experiences, knowing what is best for you can be a challenge. As a designer, the more you understand the context of the confusion, curiosity, and decision-support needs, the better you’ll be able to deliver features and content that support that experience.
Service Design: A Holistic Approach
Service Design takes this further. It requires mapping out not just individual interactions but how services fit within a larger ecosystem of customer needs. A hotel check-in process, for example, might look efficient on paper, but what about how that experience fits into a guest’s entire travel journey? Is the mobile app, customer support, or follow-up survey reinforcing the same experience, or do they feel disjointed?
Silos in organizations create disrupted customer journeys. When employees have to tell customers, “That is not my department,” it signals the urgent need for holistic, connected handling of customer relationships.
It might help to think of a design as a connecting mechanism for a relationship. Siloed decisions making reacts to fragmented contextual data. The resulting experience for users will be as fragmented, or broken. Broken is not a good place to define a Moment of Truth.
Good service design considers journey-wide touchpoints in relation to the next, anticipating needs and creating consistency throughout.
Inclusive Design: Honoring Lived Experience
Inclusive design goes beyond accessibility checklists—it involves honoring the lived experiences of diverse users. By considering the varied backgrounds, abilities, and needs of users, designers can create products and services that work for everyone. This requires empathy and a commitment to understanding different perspectives. In practice, this means involving users with diverse experiences throughout the design process, not just as an afterthought. Designing with this broader context of human diversity ensures that solutions don’t unintentionally exclude anyone, making the experience equitable.
Building Contextual Intelligence in Design Teams
As design becomes increasingly complex, solving the immediate problem is not enough. Teams need to build “contextual intelligence”—an understanding of how their designs operate in a user’s context. This context includes the factors influencing their problem-solving, decision-making, and sense-making.
Contextual intelligence in teams is a skill you build over time with regular User Research pouring into the team brain. Solving with context of use can help avoid siloed thinking and poor user experiences.
The Holy Grail- Building Contextual Intelligence in Design Teams
As AI moves in to fill the contextual weak gap, teams must boost their contextual smarts. Being Insights-Led is a key strategy in building UX maturity and doing UX management.
Building ongoing contextual intelligence in teams is no longer optional—it’s a requirement for staying relevant in an evolving AI-driven space.
Go deeper: What is Context Awareness in AI?
New Webinar: Masterclass- Designing for Context-aware experiences
