From time to time I’ve had opportunities to advise organizations on establishing and staffing an HCI research programme.  This has often been a challenge, both for them and for me, because HCI is usually a poorly understood subject within organizations that want to form an HCI research group.  This is a problem whether their existing competences lie in computer science, psychology or, as in one of my less successful career moves, IT consultancy.

It was during one of these advisory projects that I reflected on the experiences we’d had at Xerox trying to apply the SEI’s Capability Maturity Model to our research.  I realised that the problems we had with CMM were mostly due to the nature of our research, and that a “CMM for HCI” might be no bad thing.

One measure of your capability in HCI is the level of research results you can produce. My 1993 studies of the products of HCI (see my December 11th posting) had brought out what form these contributions take: novel designs, empirical findings, predictive models, etc.  And my attempts to make these contributions had taught me, often painfully, that some were more challenging than others.  Indeed the skill in building novel applications that I initially brought to bear on my HCI research turned out to be quite commonplace.

The HCI Capability Maturity Model that I offered to my client went like this:

1. Inventing: Designing and building innovative applications, and applying standard usability testing methods to them.
2. Exploring: Conducting controlled user studies of applications and techniques, or conducting field studies of application domains, and in either case reporting findings;
3. Device-level-modelling: Building models of device-level interaction, and using them to explain and/or enhance the performance of existing devices and techniques; or Application-enhancing: Applying study findings to the design of applications, repeating the studies and reporting fresh findings;
4. Application-modelling: Building models of application domains, and using them to explain and/or enhance the performance of existing systems;
5. Method-enhancing.  Developing new methods for design or evaluation, conducting comparisons of them with existing methods, and reporting findings.

The main point we can take away from this model is that the lower levels (1 and 2) of HCI research aren’t very different from what practitioners do.  Software engineers invent, build and test novel systems in the course of their work, and human factors professionals conduct controlled experiments and field studies.  It’s only at level 3 that HCI research gets into areas that practitioners don’t have the time for, or the expertise.  These days, my advice to those wanting to get into HCI research is to start by recruiting people who have worked successfully at level 3, if not higher.