How My Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) Research Shaped My Design Career
“Research in HCI continues to be the primary contributor of the methodologies, technologies and tools we use to support modern application design, and it continues to remind us that the origins of design as a discipline have always been deeply rooted in how humans interact with computers.”
Introduction
The methodology and best practices behind design are constantly evolving, yet they have always been deeply rooted in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). I think about how my career progressed in context with the rapidly changing nature and landscape of design and usability, especially when it comes to the lightning speed with which AI technologies have evolved and the ubiquity of user interfaces and technologies supporting them.
I have always viewed my time at Queen’s University and my research as a graduate student as the foundation of my career. I did not set out to pursue a career in design or usability when I started my graduate studies. In fact, I thought that my career would evolve around software development or solutions architecture. I had a good theoretical foundation during my undergraduate studies, yet the idea of choosing a research topic that is yet to be explored seemed daunting to me at first. Among all the specialized fields of study in Computer Science such as Data Mining, Machine Learning, and Parallel Computing, I knew that Software Engineering was a topic that I was interested in exploring further.
The research I embarked on with the help of my advisor, Prof. Nick Graham, involved researching and programming user interface libraries that developers would use to write applications [1]. It would take me years after completing this work to realize the significance of its contribution to HCI. That’s because I was initially focused on the execution of the ideas in my research, and designing and writing code to implement user interface libraries. However, the two years I spent doing this work would prove to be transformative in my understanding of application design, and in how my research would shape my thinking and work as a user experience designer, a product designer and an interaction designer.
The Origins of User Experience in HCI
To understand the origins of user experience design and how it evolved, it is important to shed light on how deeply rooted it is in HCI.
The term “User Experience” (UX) was originally coined by Don Norman while working at Apple in the early 1990s. On why he coined the term Norman writes [2]:
“I invented the term because I thought Human Interface and Usability were too narrow. I wanted to cover all aspects of the person’s experience with the system.”
Long before Norman proposed the term “User Experience”, Human-Computer Interaction emerged as a formal research field in Computer Science in the early 1970s and 1980s.
In 1982, the Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (SIGCHI) was established under the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM). SIGCHI was established as a global body to focus on the emergence of Human-Computer Interaction in the 1970s and 1980s as a major field of Computer Science research, and the rapid shift in computing from command-line interfaces to graphical user interfaces (GUIs). This shift highlighted the importance of human factors, cognitive psychology and ergonomics as key elements in the design of interactive systems.
Since its establishment, SIGCHI has become the most prominent international conference where top HCI researchers and design practitioners present new theories, models and technologies that have helped shape the field of usability and user experience design. SIGCHI cemented the role of HCI as a discipline of Computer Science and established the core theories, principles and methodologies behind the user experience design practice as we know it today, including usability testing, interaction design and service design.
In the Psychology of Human-Computer Interaction, Card, Moran and Newell [3] highlighted the user as the key information processor. Therefore, good systems design must focus on understanding human perception, memory and problem solving rather than hardware and programming. Furthermore, since human attention, memory and perception are limited and predictable, the system must be designed with these considerations in mind.
Card, Moran and Newell established key models that helped establish the foundations of UX research and usability today, with the most notable one being the Model Human Processor (MHP) model. The MHP model identifies the human mind as comprising of three main subsystems:
Perceptual – responsible for sensory, visual and auditory input and output.
Cognitive – responsible for thinking, reasoning and short-term memory.
Motor – responsible for all motor skills required for a user to interact with a system such typing, mouse movement and pointing, and eye tracking.
Jakob Nielsen helped further shift the focus in application development on the user when he formalized the role of usability in software engineering in his book Usability Engineering [4]. Nielsen argued that usability must be an integral part of the software design and development cycle through rapid, iterative, and low-cost methods. Nielsen also defined the five key components of usability as learnability, efficiency, memorability, errors and satisfaction. These components remain the cornerstones of user experience design and its role in the software development lifecycle today.
My Research in HCI Shaped My Mindset As a Designer
My research focused on the topic of User Interface Plasticity, which turned into a published article in an HCI journal [1]. I explored how simple user interface widgets such as a menu and a scrollbar could behave on a desktop computer and a digital whiteboard. I wrote libraries that allowed developers to write an application that automatically rendered scrollbar and menu widgets and adapted them to the device they were running on. In other words, the menu and scrollbar widgets retained plastic properties, which meant they could be ‘molded’ to match the the device they are deployed on. In designing the menu and scrollbar widget libraries, I needed to shift my focus from implementing libraries for the menu and scrollbar widgets to thinking about how these widgets would be used by the users along with the context and device. This relates back to the need to consider the perceptual, cognitive and motor subsystems discussed by Card, Moran and Newell in the MHP model.
The launch of the iPhone (2007) a few years after my research was published, and the iPad a few years after that, sparked a rapid pace of development in UI frameworks for mobile devices and tablets. This pace of development was propelled by the growing adoption of the web coupled with a user base that became increasingly sophisticated, with clear expectations on how applications should behave depending on the devices they were using. The launch of the iPhone and iPad allowed me to understand the importance of my research in defining how user interfaces behaved on different devices.
More importantly, my research shaped my understanding of how applications should behave on difference devices, and how application design overall is governed by the principles of HCI. Until that point, I was trained to write command-line programs on Linux using C, and as long as the program behaved as expected on the command line by providing the right prompts to the user, receiving the required inputs and producing the correct output, the program was considered successful.
Conclusion
The rise of Human-Computer Interaction in the 1970s and 1980s came out of a growing need to enable software applications to better serve users. It was no longer sufficient to expect that command line interfaces would be able to satisfy the needs of all users. As devices and the web evolved, so did users’ expectations of how applications should behave on the variety of devices available.
HCI was still growing as field of research in Computer Science when I embarked on my research at Queen’s University with Prof. Graham, yet it profoundly shaped my mindset as a designer, and how I approached design problems in various industries throughout my career. My research helped lay the conceptual foundations for device-independent UI frameworks that fed into ubiquitous computing, multi-platform design frameworks, adaptive UIs for smart devices and early thinking about device independence and context awareness. Through this work I was able to practice novel concepts at the time such as the MHP model, and other concepts introduced by Nielsen on usability in software engineering.
All of this work helped focus me on solving design problems and designing applications with a clear focus on user interaction. This is why I believe that as designers we must ensure that we always maintain a thorough understanding of the theory and research the HCI field offers. The core foundations of design have always been deeply rooted in Human-Computer Interaction, in Computer Science and in Psychology. Research in HCI continues to be the primary contributor of the methodologies, technologies and tools we use to support modern application design, and it continues to remind us that the origins of design as a discipline have always been deeply rooted in how humans interact with computers.
If this story resonates with you — or if you’re tackling challenges at the intersection of UX design, usability, and emerging technologies like AI — I’d love to connect.
Whether you’re working on adaptive interfaces, modernizing legacy systems, or simply want to apply HCI principles more deeply in your product design, I help teams bridge research, strategy, and practical execution.
Feel free to reach out through LinkedIn. Let’s explore how thoughtful, human-centered design can transform your next project.
References
[1] Jabarin, B., & Graham, T. C. N. (2003). Architectures for widget-level plasticity. In Proceedings of the 10th International Workshop on Design, Specification, and Verification of Interactive Systems.
[2] Norman, D. A. (n.d.). The Definition of User Experience (UX). Nielsen Norman Group. Retrieved July 9, 2025, from https://www.nngroup.com/articles/definition-user-experience/
[3] Card, S. K., Moran, T. P., & Newell, A. (1983). The Psychology of Human-Computer Interaction. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
[4] Nielsen, J. (1993). Usability Engineering. Boston, MA: Academic Press.
