My research interests and core competencies are in traditional and emerging areas of human-computer interaction (HCI). As an example of a traditional HCI topic, I am working on creating a process for generating interaction and software requirements from affinity diagrams derived from contextual inquiry and analysis data. An example of a combination of traditional and new HCI topics is motivated by the information- and task- fragmentation due to pervasive penetration of mobile devices into a user’s space. In response I am developing the idea of “continuous user interfaces” to support seamless task migration across multiple platforms. Finally as an example of an emerging HCI topic, I have recently been working to address the question of how sustainability concerns can inform the process for developing interactive systems and the resulting products.
As part of my dissertation research on a framework to foster communication between the software engineering and usability engineering life cycles, I sought effective ways to connect HCI life cycle processes with software engineering methodologies. Typically, development in the software engineering life cycle for the system functionality is done independently from development in the usability engineering life cycle for the user interface, with little communication between them. This lack of communication results in reduced overall situational awareness, higher risks in managing design changes, missed opportunities to coordinate and synchronize related activities, and delayed possibilities to check constraints and dependencies.
To foster and structure communication among developer roles within the software engineering and usability engineering life cycles, I developed “Ripple” (so named because of the ripple-effect of a thread of communication), a three-part communication framework. The first part is an abstract model that formally defines what Ripple does and how it works – the concepts, entities, and relationships. The second part is an implementation schema that reifies the abstract conceptual model into a concrete communication structure for application within real-world efforts for developing interactive systems. The third part is an implementation instance that tailors the implementation schema to a specific project, including the scope, goals, parameters, personnel, development activities, roles, and work products particular to that project.
I evaluated the Ripple framework in an exploratory study set in a joint graduate-level offering of the software engineering and usability engineering courses at Virginia Tech. Using a real-world client for several parallel development efforts, I explored communication-related tradeoffs among different development styles and approaches to team compositions, skill sets, and development roles.
While a formal summative study with statistically significant results is the norm for much HCI research, my research called for a more holistic empirical approach that I called an exploratory study. Exploratory studies such as this are often necessary in new research areas before the parameters that can be used in a summative study are yet identified and decomposed into controllable independent variables. Exploratory studies are instrumental in extracting and identifying the issues to be studied in later summative studies.
Some of my expectations about the need for and effectiveness of communication were supported in the results. For example, I found evidence of usefulness of the Ripple instance. Some other expectations were corrected with new insights and understanding into human performance within different contexts for developing interactive software. For example, contrary to expectation, I found dual-experts (people who, because of their expertise in playing both SE and UE roles, I expected to perform very well) performed poorly due to possible cognitive dissonance between the concerns related to the two different life cycles and an inherent conflict of interest between designing for ease of use vs. designing for ease of implementation.
Yet other expectations were not met because some operating assumptions about roles in a project were not fulfilled. Although these assumptions seemed reasonable, I identified what I call anomalies in social behavior, which when they occurred, outweighed the initial expectations. In other words, certain aspects (negative and positive) of social dynamics of collaborative work can swamp the effects of structured communication or its absence. One such anomaly was the reluctance of a software engineer to consider the usability counterparts as a respected part of the overall team and unwillingness to adopt their user interface designs. Consequently, this team’s performance was less than expected.
My dissertation research has important implications for the quality of systems, composition of teams in the real world, and the checks and balances necessary to ensure positive team dynamics for creating interactive systems. It also has implications for teams that are geographically distributed – a common feature in today’s world of outsourcing.
With experience from this study, I now plan to conduct follow-up studies to support (or not) my exploratory results and to gain a better understanding of the communication needs within a development project and how they can be effectively met. Further, I plan on investigating the nature of the human interaction anomalies I discovered, potential strategies to prevent problems arising from them, and suitability of particular team compositions for different types of interactive systems.
Also, in this exploratory study I simulated the Ripple framework using behind-the-scenes monitoring and analyses of each team’s work products and timeline. This so-called “Wizard of Oz” approach afforded the agility necessary to adapt to unexpected events in the study. However, this advantage was achieved at the expense of being unable to detect each team’s design progress until they posted a deliverable or after they held a meeting. I plan to produce a software implementation of the Ripple communication framework to replace the Wizard of Oz approach to testing with a real communication tool and to allow me to detect fine-grained events in the development space.
More broadly, I believe that software support tools in general are critical to the discipline of HCI, which has matured in recent years and has consistently demonstrated its importance. However, the extent of HCI adoption in the broader software development world is still limited and, where adopted, somewhat ad-hoc.
One key reason for this state of the art is the lack of support for HCI processes and activities in software engineering development environment tools. Therefore, my long-term research agenda includes defining and developing a comprehensive suite of HCI software support tools to facilitate broader adoption and integration of HCI methods with existing software development methodologies. This is important because development environments embody methodologies and dictate the extent of their incorporation; development environments provide scaffolding for novice users to adopt processes and experienced practitioners to use them. Historically this has been true in the HCI counterpart, software engineering, where the wide spread assimilation of particular methodologies (e.g. agile processes) into organizations did not occur until a corresponding development infrastructure to support those methodologies was made available.
This work has potential large payoffs for both academic research on HCI methodologies and application in industry via software support tools.