A Systematic Mapping Study of HCI Practice Research

ABSTRACT

Human–computer interaction (HCI) practice has emerged as a research domain in the HCI field and is growing. The need to transfer HCI practices to the industry began significantly with the works of Nielsen on usability engineering. To date, methods and techniques for designing, evaluating, and implementing interactive systems for human use have continued to emerge. It is, therefore, justified to conduct a systematic mapping study to determine the landscape of HCI practice research. A Systematic Mapping Study method was used to map 142 studies according to research type, topic, and contribution. These were then analyzed to determine an overview of HCI practice research. The objective was to analyze studies on HCI practice and present prominent issues that characterize the HCI practice research landscape. Second, to identify pressing challenges regarding HCI practices in software/systems development companies. The results show that HCI practice research has steadily increased since 2012. The majority of the studies explored focused on evaluation research that largely contributed to the evaluation methods or processes. Most of the studies were on design tools and techniques, design methods and contexts, design work and organizational culture, and collaboration and team communication. Interviews, case studies, and survey methods have been prominently used as research methods. HCI techniques are mostly used during the initial phase of development and during evaluation. HCI practice challenges in companies are mostly process-related and on performance of usability and user experience activities. The major challenge seems to be to find a way to collect and incorporate user feedback in a timely manner, especially in agile processes. There are areas identified in this study as needing more research.

Notes

1. User-centered design and human-centered design are used interchangeably in the existing HCI literature.

2. Source: The Internet.

3. SM38 – has been available online since 28 January 2016.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Abiodun Afolayan Ogunyemi

Abiodun Afolayan Ogunyemi holds a PhD from Tallinn University, Estonia. He currently works as a Project Specialist Usability/UX Studies at the same institution. He is a member of the Estonian ACM SIGCHI chapter (http://sigchi.org). His research interests are in human-centered software engineering, software process improvement, and usability requirement elicitation.

David Lamas

David Lamas is a Professor of Interaction Design at Tallinn University’s School of Digital Technologies, where he heads the Human–Computer Interaction (HCI) academic curates the Master in HCI. He also serves as the chair of the Estonian chapter of ACM’s SIGCHI (http://sigchi.org) and as an expert member of IFIP’s TC13 (http://ifip-tc13.org).

Marta Kristin Lárusdóttir

Marta Kristin Lárusdóttir is an associate professor at the School of Computer Science at Reykjavik University, Iceland. Her main research focus is the integration of the user perspective in agile software development. Marta heads the CRESS research center at Reykjavik University (https://en.ru.is/cress) and is an expert member of IFIP’s TC13 (http://ifip-tc13.org).

Fernando Loizides

Fernando Loizides is Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Computer Science and Informatics at Cardiff University, UK. His main research lies in Information Interaction and User Experience. He combines computer science with digital library research to investigate system enhancement using emerging technologies. He has applied development experience with several commercialized applications.