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1.3 Changes in topics of HCI research over time 3

Methodological contributions—new approaches that influence processes in
research or practice, such as a new method, new application of a method,
modification of a method, or a new metric or instrument for measurement.
Theoretical contributions—concepts and models which are vehicles for thought,
which may be predictive or descriptive, such as a framework, a design space, or
a conceptual model.
Dataset contributions—a contribution which provides a corpus for the benefit of
the research community, including a repository, benchmark tasks, and actual data.
Survey contributions—a review and synthesis of work done in a specific area,
to help identify trends and specific topics that need more work. This type of
contribution can only occur after research in a certain area has existed for a few
years so that there is sufficient work to analyze.
Opinion contributions—writings which seek to persuade the readers to change
their minds, often utilizing portions of the other contributions listed above, not
simply to inform, but to persuade.
The majority of HCI research falls into either empirical research or artifact con-
tributions, and this book specifically addresses empirical research using all of the
potential data collection methods utilized in empirical research. In their analysis of
research papers submitted to the CHI 2016 conference, Wobbrock and Kientz found
that paper authors indicated in the submission form that over 70% of the papers sub-
mitted were either empirical studies of system use or empirical studies of people, and
28.4% were artifact/system papers (it is important to note that authors could select
more than one category, so percentages can add up to more than 100%). There were
a fair number of papers submitted on methodological contributions, but submissions
in all of the other categories of contributions were rare (Wobbrock and Kientz, 2016).
This provides some empirical data for what we (as book authors) have observed, that
most HCI research is either empirical or systems research (or sometimes, a combina-
tion of both, such as when you develop a prototype and have users evaluate it).

1.3 CHANGES IN TOPICS OF HCI RESEARCH OVER TIME
The original HCI research in the 1980s was often about how people interacted with
simple (or not so simple) office automation programs, such as word processing, da-
tabase, and statistical software. The basics of interfaces, such as dialog boxes, and
error messages, were the focus of much research. Some of the classic HCI articles
of the 1980s, such as Norman's analysis of human error (Norman, 1983), Carroll's
“training wheels” approach to interface design (Carroll and Carrithers, 1984), and
Shneiderman's work on direct manipulation (Shneiderman, 1983) are still very rel-
evant today. Towards the late 1980s, graphical user interfaces started to take hold. In
the late 1980s and early 1990s, there was growth in the area of usability engineering
methods (and the Usability Professionals' Association, now known as UXPA, was
founded in 1991). But there was a major shift in the field of HCI research during the
early to mid 1990s, as the Internet and the web gained wide acceptance. New types
of interfaces and communication, such as web pages, e-mail, instant messaging,