Reprioritizing the relationship between HCI research and practice

Abstract

There has been an ongoing conversation about the role and relationship of theory and practice in the HCI community. This paper explores this relationship privileging a practice perspective through a tentative model, which describes a "bubble-up" of ideas from practice to inform research and theory development, and an accompanying "trickle-down" of theory into practice. Interviews were conducted with interaction designers, which included a description of their use of design methods in practice, and their knowledge and use of two common design methods-affinity diagramming and the concept of affordance. Based on these interviews, potential relationships between theory and practice are explored through this model. Disseminating agents already common in HCI practice are addressed as possible mechanisms for the research community to understand practice more completely. Opportunities for future research, based on the use of the tentative model in a generative way, are considered.

Flow of Competence in UX Design Practice

“…In particular, it is vital to address the latent states between performance and adoption, especially where beliefs and actions are incompatible or in tension. This underlines the importance of understanding an individual designer's identity, and how that development occurs in tandem with their surrounding corporate culture [13], and how this development might indicate flow of competence bidirectionally [14]. Additionally, the experiences of the participants we described promotes ongoing reflection, often on a metacognitive level, about design practice.…”

“…When we are able to understand how competence shifts along these dimensions, both internally to a designer and externally to a larger group (with all of the component movements between states that are implied), we will have a greater understanding of UX competence in situ [14], which will lead to documentation of effective adoption strategies.…”

Judgment and Instructional Design: How ID Practitioners Work In Practice

“…Such attempts tend to redefine practice via theoretical argumentation (e.g., the paradigms and ADDIE superimposed by Visscher‐Voerman & Gustafson, ), thereby generating inappropriate or even unusable tools and widening the gap between theory and practice (Stolterman, ). Defining practice on its own terms and working toward improvement of it from that basis holds the promise of expanding the aspects of practice that can be addressed by theory and of improving alignment between the two (Gray, Stolterman, & Siegel, ).…”

Knowledge Production and Social Roles in an Online Community of Emerging Occupation: A Study of User Experience Practitioners on Reddit

“…The five roles of knowledge workers that we identified represent one productive way of characterizing the movement of knowledge in and around the UX community, reflecting an ongoing divide between the pragmatic expectations of knowledge in UX practice, and the role of translators in identifying abstract, academically-defined theories and concepts and making them relevant for the practitioner community. This movement reflects the "trickle-down" of knowledge in HCI, as defined by Gray, Stolterman, and Siegel [24], yet in this community, we see no parallel "bubbling-up" of knowledge back into the academic discourse. Figure 1 illustrates the relationship of the various identified roles to knowledge production and the research/practice divide.…”

“…Additionally, few formal means of certification and licensure agencies are consistently accepted as relevant or valid by UX practitioners. Hence, there is no direct or well-defined path to becoming a UX professional, and neither is there a definite means of maintaining and developing UX expertise and skills for existing practitioners [24].…”