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Abstract

This commentary reflects my personal views of the future research challenges and directions in human-computer interaction (HCI) research in the field of Management Information Systems (MIS). It may be that many in our community do not share my concerns about the issues I consider important and the challenges we face. My intent here is not to argue that others should pursue approaches similar to mine, or to predict what type of work would be most fruitful and important in the future. Rather, my intent is to share some of the principles and ideas I would like to follow in my future research. I hope that these comments will lead to a debate (in this AIS Transactions) about how our community should plan for the future in HCI research and how we can make it more relevant, interesting and exciting. I will discuss my views below: DESIGN I have often commented to my students that research worth doing should be new, true, interesting 1 , and relevant (to practice). I strongly believe that to be interesting and relevant, research in HCI should have a design component coupled with an evaluation of this design. This belief may be due to my training as a doctoral student and influenced by my experience working on my doctoral thesis, which was part of the original Minnesota Experiments (Dickson, Senn, and Chervany, 1977). The design component can take the form of a particular IS or IT (such as interface, format, guidance, navigation, etc.), preferably as an antecedent influencing the constructs of interest (such as usability, effectiveness, understanding, etc.), in the models or theories that are tested. In my earlier papers I have advocated the inclusion of a design component, arguing that it is important for both creating a unique identity (Benbasat and Zmud, 2003) and increasing the practical relevance of our work (Benbasat and Barki, 2007). Some of the work that deals with adoption research in HCI eschews the design element in the models tested; focusing instead on surrogate variables that reflect the perceived quality of (an unspecified) design, such as its usefulness and ease of use. This type of study cannot generate any specific design advice for HCI practitioners. I have similar views about other key and often studied variables such as trust in HCI adoption models of e-commerce applications. It is the responsibility of the HCI researcher to think about how to design an IT artifact to effectively increase trust in that artifact and its utilization (for example, see Wang and Benbasat, 2008 (Hevner et al., 2004). While I would be honored to join the ranks of design scientists, I do not think they would consider me to be one according to discussions I have had with my design scientist colleagues. I believe the key difference between HCI and design science is that design scientists' main focus is on "how to design well" based on well-defined principles, ontologies, and methods (see for example, Wand and Weber, 2002), whereas ours is on evaluation. This led me to think about where ideas and justifications for HCI designs...