Bridge the gap: Toward a common ground: practice and research in HCI

Parush, A. (2006): Bridge the gap: Toward a common ground: practice and research in HCI, interactions Volume 13, Number 6 (2006), Pages 61-62.

Via Nicolas. This article underlines the gap between research and practice in HCI. Primarily because practitioners express difficulties in benefiting from research. HCI is a discipline concerned on the one hand with practice (design, evaluation, and/or implementation of interactive computing systems), and on the other, with the research into phenomena associated with this practice. The ability to utilize and benefit from any of the research types depends on how a practitioner defines his practical problem as a research question. The author distinguished 4 tiers in HCI research: usability, comparison, guidelines and theory.

These dimensions differs according to the “level of focus” (”range from addressing questions focusing on a specific product, to comparing between products, to searching and examining guidelines for a family of products, through to general questions on behavioral, social, organizational, and other phenomena“) and “extent of generalization”.

The ability to utilize and benefit from any of the research types depends on how a practitioner defines his practical problem as a research question. The abstraction of the question on different levels can lead one to search and find potentially beneficial research that can be applied in the practical arena.

Relation to my thesis: Currently writing my research plan I wonder how may research could have practical benefits. The 4 tiers are a good help to frame my goals and methods. Usability testing (and participatory design) to get information on the usability of my design, comparative information from literature review, guidelines from field studies (are they real behavioral research methods?), and then try to derive theoretical implications (model for a specific phenomenom?). Things are still fuzzy…