❔ What is it about?
Together with Elahi Hossain, Yoana Ahmetoglu (nee Petrova), Anna Dowthwaite, Laura Lascău, Jon Mella, and Nora Stern I’m pleased to announce we have now published a paper in 𝘐𝘯𝘵𝘦𝘳𝘢𝘤𝘵𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘸𝘪𝘵𝘩 𝘊𝘰𝘮𝘱𝘶𝘵𝘦𝘳𝘴 that outlines an emerging Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) method for reviewing user-facing technologies!
👥 Who is this for?
Any HCI/UX researchers -especially MSc and PhD students- who want to know how to go about reviewing different examples of a technology designed for humans to directly interact with (e.g., a set of health/fitness/finance/wellbeing apps, chatbots etc.)
💡 What did we do in this paper?
1️⃣ Proposed “𝗳𝘂𝗻𝗰𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝗮𝗹𝗶𝘁𝘆 𝗿𝗲𝘃𝗶𝗲𝘄” as an umbrella term to formally define the phenomena of ‘researchers examining a set of existing technologies to understand their features’ as a new emerging HCI method.
2️⃣ Identified three primary research aims that characterize functionality reviews in the HCI field: classification, evaluation, and insight development.
3️⃣ Proposed a typology that categorizes functionality reviews based on 1) search approach (systematic versus scoping), and 2) reviewing approach (descriptive versus critical analyses) – allowing researchers to better align their research objectives (i.e., why to conduct a functionality review) with appropriate methodological choices (i.e., how to conduct a functionality review).
Why is this important?
By defining functionality reviews, outlining their methodological characteristics, and developing a typology, we aim to establish a foundation for the standardization of this emerging HCI method.
Cite as: Elahi Hossain, Yoana Ahmetoglu, Shiping Chen, Anna Dowthwaite, Laura Lascau, Jon Mella, Nora Stern, Anna L Cox, Mapping the landscape of functionality reviews in HCI: trends, methods, and contributions, Interacting with Computers, 2025;, iwaf027, https://doi-org.libproxy.ucl.ac.uk/10.1093/iwc/iwaf027