A longitudinal review of Mobile HCI research methods

Abstract

This paper revisits a research methods survey from 2003 and contrasts it with a survey from 2010. The motivation is to gain insight about how mobile HCI research has evolved over the last decade in terms of approaches and focus. The paper classifies 144 publications from 2009 published in 10 prominent outlets by their research methods and purpose. Comparing this to the survey for 2000-02 show that mobile HCI research has changed methodologically. From being almost exclusively driven by engineering and applied research, current mobile HCI is primarily empirically driven, involves a high number of field studies, and focus on evaluating and understanding, as well as engineering. It has also become increasingly multi-methodological, combining and diversifying methods from different disciplines. At the same time, new opportunities and challenges have emerged.

A Survey of the Trajectories Conceptual Framework

“…We have been inspired by Boehner et al's study of the impact of cultural probes on HCI methodology in which they traced and analyzed literature that cited the spread of probes, revealing how the original notion of a cultural probe was reinterpreted to inform many variants [5]. Our approach also echoes how Kjeldskov and Paay [13] coded their review of mobile HCI literature along two dimensions (purpose and methods), although we're less interested in the global purpose and contents of papers but rather focus on the use of one specific conceptual framework, which may be a more or less central feature of each paper.…”

“…There are, of course, numerous examples of HCI research based on literature review, for example looking at the production of theory [20], adoption of methods such as ethnography [8] and human computation [17], or summarizing progress in specific areas such as Mobile HCI [13,14] to name just a few. There are also examples of using bibliometric analysis to explore issues such as the nature of publications from different countries and organizations and the merit or otherwise of CHI Best Paper awards [2], conducting co-word analysis to establish a broad thematic mapping of the field [15], and even applying bibliometrics to rank individual scholars [16].…”

MUUX-E, a framework of criteria for evaluating the usability, user experience and educational features of m-learning environments

“…MHCI focuses on interaction via mobile devices (such as smartphones and tablets), services, and mo- [15], and incorporates mobile usability and user experience studies [6].…”

“…Research in 2009 by Kjeldskov and Paay on the nature and volume of MHCI publications indicates the emergence of various trends [15]. While studies on projects relating to the engineering of new systems had decreased, the number of publications on user-centric, empirical studies with evaluation foci had increased substantially.…”

Towards Deeper Understanding of User Experience with Ubiquitous Computing Systems: Systematic Literature Review and Design Framework

“…These literature reviews include, for instance, surveys focusing on Internet of Things [4] or context-aware smart homes [41]. HCI-oriented surveys have been conducted on research methods in mobile HCI [32], virtual environments [8], augmented reality (AR) [51,17] and UX study practices in general [5]. For example, Swan et al [51] show that user experiments have been conducted only in 8% of AR studies.…”