http://cacm.acm.org/blogs/blog-cacm/163199-two-examples-of-hci-research/fulltext
April 10, 2013
An undergrad recently sent me the following message: "I was thinking today that I would like to learn more about what HCI research involves. Can you recommend any papers for me to read?"
I decided to follow Matt Might's advice (at http://matt.might.net/articles/how-to-blog-as-an-academic/) and write a public blog post about this topic, rather than just replying privately to this student.
(Disclaimer: HCI is a very diverse field, so I obviously do not claim to speak for all HCI researchers. If you asked 10 randomly selected HCI researchers to write this post, you will get 10 different answers.)
To me, research in HCI (human-computer interaction) involves
Here, the term "computer" can refer to a desktop machine, laptop, tablet, mobile phone, digital eyewear (http://www.google.com/glass/start/), or an assortment of other electronic devices; it can also refer to both software and hardware running on these devices.
Some HCI research involves doing science (such as understanding), while others are more focused on engineering (such as creating).
There is no way that I can do justice to the entire world of HCI in one blog post, so instead I will present two papers that exemplify some typical characteristics of modern HCI research.
The lead author on both papers is my colleague Joel Brandt (http://www.joelbrandt.org/), who performed this work while he was a Ph.D. student in the Stanford computer science department. At the time, Joel's focus within HCI was on how programmers (humans!) interact with computer software used throughout the programming process (for example, IDEs (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_development_environment), debuggers, Web browsers).
Two Studies of Opportunistic Programming: Interleaving Web Foraging, Learning, and Writing Code (Brandt et al., CHI 2009, http://www.joelbrandt.org/publications/brandt_chi2009_programmer_web_use.pdf) was published at CHI 2009 (http://www.chi2009.org/), a notable academic conference for HCI research.
The research described by this paper is an example of "understanding how humans interact with computers." Specifically, Joel and his colleagues sought to understand how programmers interact with digital resources found on the Web.
To do so, the research team performed two studies:
These two studies complement and reinforce one another. The first provides a great level of detail (direct human observation) but a small sample size (N=20). The second provides little detail (search queries) but a large sample size (N=24,000). By reading both studies in the paper, you can understand the relative strengths and weaknesses of each approach.
The findings presented by HCI studies such as the ones in this paper serve two roles: they contribute to the body of scientific knowledge about a form of human-computer interaction (for example, Web usage during programming), and they inspire researchers to create new kinds of tools to improve such interactions.
For example, the findings in this paper suggest ways that existing IDEs can be augmented to help programmers better leverage Web resources. These findings directly inspired Joel's next research project, which led to...
A year later, Joel published Example-Centric Programming: Integrating Web Search into the Development Environment (Brandt et al., CHI 2010, http://www.joelbrandt.org/publications/brandt_chi2010_example_centric_programming.pdf).
The research described by this paper is an example of "creating new and effective ways for humans to interact with computers." Here, Joel and his colleagues sought to create a new and better way for programmers to use snippets of example code they find on the Web.
To do so, Joel spent a summer internship at Adobe building a plug-in for Adobe Flash Builder(http://www.adobe.com/technology/projects/blueprint.html), which embeds a domain-specific search engine within the IDE (see screenshot).
This system, called Blueprint, combines an IDE plugin and custom search engine to enable new kinds of user interactions, such as:
The first half of his paper describes how Joel used insights from the studies in his prior paper to design the Blueprint system. The second half describes two studies the team ran to show that Blueprint was effective:
Finally, a customary way to end these sorts of papers is by discussing current limitations of the system and some ideas for future work.
These two papers formed the bulk of Joel's 2010 Ph.D. dissertation (http://www.joelbrandt.org/publications/brandt_2010_phd_dissertation.pdf). His research started in a university lab at Stanford, continued during summer internships at Adobe, and eventually turned into a feature within a commercial software product (Blueprint) that thousands of people use on a daily basis. I like presenting this work because it is a good example of how HCI research can be done in both academia and industry, and can range from scientific studies to the development of practical tools.
Joel's work is just the tip of the iceberg, though. Besides studying the interaction between humans and computers, there is a lot of HCI research that explores how humans interact with one another via computers. For example, projects might involve:
Reading the four papers mentioned in this blog post will give you a sense of how HCI papers are structured. Enjoy!
HCI research: I ask 10 different researchers and get 15 different answers!
What about theoretical models for HCI; that may reduce the dimensions.
Anonymous
Some nice points in this post, thanks. Responding to your anonymous commenter, HCI is indeed a diverse field that moves with the times, so as technologies change, so do some (but not all) of the research foci.
The SIGCHI Executive Committee has been looking into HCI as a field in a project focused on HCI Education. We have written an interim report which is accessible from our website (http://www.sigchi.org/). The results are also summarized on the Interactions website (see http://interactions.acm.org/archive/view/march-april-2013/teaching-and-learning-human-computer-interaction).
Elizabeth Churchill
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