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CHAPTER

Online and ubiquitous HCI 14

research

14.1 INTRODUCTION
Where and how do humans interact with computers? Much of the early work in
human-computer interaction (HCI) research—and, indeed, some of the content in
this book—focused on traditional computers—monitors and keyboards on desks,
perhaps with mice or other input devices by their side. However, that is far from
the whole story. As important as traditional computing has been and continues to
be, much of how we interact with computers has moved from beyond the desktop
onto the Internet and beyond. Social media, crowdsourcing, connected devices, and
the “Internet of Things” all present interesting opportunities across the spectrum of
human-computer interaction research—from understanding needs to evaluating sys-
tems and then studying how those systems are used.
This chapter attempts to tie together areas of work that might at first seem disjoint.
Online research discusses techniques for conducting remote usability studies and
other internet-enabled research, including studies of social media and online com-
munities (online surveys are covered in Chapter 5). Human computation discusses
the use of online tools that ask large numbers of users to perform small tasks—an
approach that has proven very useful for many HCI studies. Sensors and Ubiquitous
computing expands upon the cell phones and fitness monitoring devices described in
Chapter 13, to include the widespread use of inexpensive sensors to measure aspects
of the world around us, providing augmented depictions of daily life and everyday
environments.
Although these topics may seem very different, they share the common thread
of investigating computer use outside of traditional contexts and goals. Online
studies and ubiquitous computing research investigate the role of computing in
social and everyday environments that would not have been possible in the early
days of HCI research in the 1980s. Similarly, human computation studies envi-
sion novel approaches of the power of connected communities of people to solve
otherwise difficult problems. We will discuss some examples of these new forms
of computing, and how they might inform and extend the possibilities of your HCI
research.

Research Methods in Human-Computer Interaction. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-805390-4.00014-5 411
© 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.