It Depends: A website context primer

Context is the variable that determines whether a web experience succeeds or fails, and why designing for a single best-case scenario guarantees you'll miss someone.

Context is the positioning of our content or our purpose, and that is how it ultimately provides value to our audience. That's why it depends.

This article catalogs the full range of contextual factors at play: device and connection, physical environment, cultural background, emotional state, ability, familiarity, organizational politics, legacy tech, and more.

The point isn't that everything is equally variable — it's that any one of these factors, in the wrong combination, can turn a well-designed experience into a harmful one. Facebook's algorithmic missteps serve as the cautionary example.

The article pairs the IA venn diagram of users, content, and context with a re-illustrated infographic mapping how quickly a person's context can shift mid-task, sometimes in under two seconds.

Every factor so far can affect a user experience, and sometimes one another. Once you combine all the context, you can understand just one person, in just one moment.

This article was originally published on Lullabot.com.