Keywords

1 Introduction

Human-computer interaction (HCI) has been considered as computer-related cross-disciplinary domain that is strongly associated with design for information, interaction, and communication and technology [6, 16, 25, 26, 42, 51, 62]. Researchers in HCI are frequently involved in designing research prototypes based on theories from the cognitive and social sciences, anthropology, and sociology in addition to computer science. They equally focus on HCI research [25] and the analytic approaches and techniques in design practice [6, 7, 29, 60]. However, there is a lack of clarity regarding the nature of design processes involved in this influential field and the role of design and design thinking in HCI research and practice.

HCI education and practice have been facing many challenges triggered by the rapid advancement of technology [17]. Fast changing interface and interaction systems require new processes that allow for rapidly developed designs, evaluations, and interaction strategies facilitating efficient and unique user interactions with computer systems [65]. This emphasizes the continuous change that the HCI discipline has to go through to adopt the challenge of ‘speed’ [17, 32]. How can HCI design process be morphed into a more flexible process allowing for creative design explorations, in a rapid manner? One approach to address this question might be an integration with a process valued for its effective problem-solution exploration [14, 21, 27, 52, 61]: Design thinking.

Design thinking (DT) has gained increased interest in the past decade [12, 38, 47, 48]. According to Brown [10], DT is a “human-centered, creative, iterative, and practical approach to finding the best ideas and ultimate solutions” with innovative activities, proving itself as an effective strategy for organizational changes [10]. These characteristics allow DT to be used widely in diverse contexts [44, 45, 49, 57] as well as creating and making choices [49]. Also, DT allows involving various disciplines to address complex problems and enhance user experience [8, 46, 69] emphasizing human values [16].

This paper describes a systematic literature review conducted on potential DT and HCI process integration. The objective of this review is to focus on where the variations between the two processes exist and why, with the goal of proposing how these variations could be translated and transformed into each other. This work provides a considerable body of literature that is of great potential importance to design research in both HCI and other design domains. The research questions are: (1) How do HCI and DT design processes overlap? (2) How does the HCI design process differ from DT design process? and (3) What are the lessons HCI and DT could learn from each other’s processes?

2 Human-Computer Interaction Process

HCI is concerned with methods and tools for the development of human-computer interfaces, assessing the usability of computer systems [56] and with broader human-centric issues including how people interact with computers [19]. It is based on theories about how humans process information and interact with technology and other people in social contexts where computers are used, placing HCI designers at the heart of a system interaction between human and machine [31, 37]. This interaction also brings design knowledge into the context, such as visual hierarchy, color, and typography [71].

The first step in the HCI process, what is wanted, focuses on investigating user’s needs and their lifestyles to provide insights on how the HCI designers can generate interactive solutions to match the user’s needs [19, 62]. Some suggested tools for this exploration phase are interviewing the user, recording the user’s behavior, observing user’s world directly, and analyzing existing documents [19].

Analysis step emphasizes synthesizing the main issues coming from the first step and provides directions to the next step, design [19]. The main goal of this phase is to solve problems while bringing usability factors and practices into the process [19]. As designers’ progress towards the goal of the ideal solution, they develop prototypes to analyze the quality of their solutions using guidelines such as Shneiderman’s eight golden rules, guidelines like heuristics, and Norman’s seven and Nielsen’s 10 design principles. These guidelines are used to enhance the solution’s usability and interaction with the targeted users [19]. Paper-based designs, storyboards, video presentation, and cardboard mockup are created as early forms of prototypes [19, 62]. Next step is integrating physical device and software where HCI researchers rely on guidelines to assess design violations while users interact with the solutions in their own environment [19]. Prototypes are often treated as restricted presentations of a design and used for testing the solutions effectiveness with the users [62]. This design evaluation phase helps the HCI designers to find problems and gives them an opportunity to address it in early steps of development [19]. Once the prototype is proven to be effective and functional, the design is implemented and deployed to market [19].

3 Design Thinking Process

Design thinking (DT) offers a systematic, exciting direction for creative problem solution, by integrating human, business and technical factors [11, 16, 22, 23, 58] with a focus on building innovative solutions relying on user-centered perspective [9, 10, 52, 65, 67]. An increasing number of companies and institutions, from industry giants like IBM to startups like Airbnb, have adopted this user-centric innovation method, along with accompanying mindsets and toolkits.

Design thinking originated from processes used by designers, such as user understanding and user experience. In recent years, its application has been extended to address wider problems – ways for companies and other groups to identify new strategic directions, innovate new service possibilities, or implement procedural change. DT has a non-linear process steps with iterative loops [9, 20, 35, 55, 67], and each step includes various tools that achieve each goal [55, 67]. Although these principles, perspectives and general outline of the process are similar across different visual representations, because DT adopts Simon’s [63] model widely [35], specific steps including tools might differ [9, 21, 35, 54, 68].

Design thinking rests on defining different stages of innovation - discovering and describing problems via processes to connect with users and frame challenges. This inspiration evolves into stages of ideation and prototyping; opportunities for solution can then be tested and refined, to result in final implementation. Five-steps including empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test introduced by the Hasso-Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford (d.school) [55]. Empathy is the key principle for this process as it builds on understanding users, their needs, motivations, emotions, and experiences [35, 50, 55, 68], through observations and contextual inquiries [35] and interviewing activities [50].

The aim of define step is to generate meaningful problem statements [55] based on the information and insights gathered and built through the empathize stage, and analyzed and framed to reflect the objective [35, 50]. The ideate step is often referred to as the “creative” step [68] where many alternative ideas are generated [9] through brainstorming, brainwriting, and visualization activities [35, 68].

Generated ideas (solutions) are then transferred into quick prototypes [50, 68]. This step is an experimental phase, and to goal is to investigate what works and doesn’t work to inform the ideate phase once again [50]. Through inexpensive or downscaled versions of the prototypes [10, 35, 55] designers derive useful feedback [55]. Prototypes can take various forms, such as videos, role-playing activities, post-it notes, or storyboards to communicate the message to the user, to observe their interaction with the proposed solutions in different ways and to refine the solutions [35, 55].

In the test step, real users evaluate the prototypes and provide feedback about why the prototype is satisfactory and not satisfactory [50, 68]. This is another chance to understand users and improve provided solutions [5, 55]. These feedback loops allow designers to go back to previous steps [68]. Design thinking, in nature, is iterative, rather than a linear process. Although these five steps are practiced; the order changes based on the context of the problem and in many cases designers go back to collecting additional insights or reframing their problem statements based on what they observe in the interaction with the prototypes. In this paper, our goal is to describe specific features practiced in the two user-centered design processes and identify the touchpoints they can interact and complement.

4 Research Methodology

The role of systematic review is to investigate, evaluate, and interpret all potential researches related to specific research questions, interests, or themes [40]. Our approach for a systematic review in HCI and DT processes was informed by the three stages suggested by Kitchenham [40]: (1) planning, (2) execution and (3) results analysis. This review was conducted by a researcher with a background in visual design and HCI, with input from a design thinking researcher.

4.1 Planning

As stated previously, the review focused on the how the human-computer interaction design process was practiced compared to the design thinking process. Only studies focusing on these two topics were included. In the initial ‘planning’ phase, we reviewed 14 articles that focused on systematic literature review of concepts close to HCI and DT, including engineering design, design education, and interaction design. Our goal with this phase was to identify the selection and exclusion criteria commonly that would be most suitable for our purposes of a comparative review analysis. Table 1 shows the synthesis of this review process, each paper’s extraction criteria, keywords used for inclusion, number of papers reviewed, and process of finding the papers.

Table 1. Reviewed papers.
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Table 2. Inclusion criteria.
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The 14 reviewed papers demonstrated that HCI and DT have been adopted in various disciplines particularly in designing games, products, systems and other user experiences. Additionally, the articles guided us in exploring strategies to find and analyze relevant papers in literature; the reviewed articles used similar processes where majority of them adopted “keywords search” to search for papers and applied systematic review method for analysis articles. Therefore, our search strategy and article selection process replicated the 14 publications we reviewed, following a “keywords search” methodology [2, 5, 13, 38, 70].

4.2 Execution

Literature was initially gathered through searches of major design, engineering, and computer science databases (e.g., ACM Digital Library, Technology Research Database) conducted between September 5, 2017 and December 5, 2017. Search terms are presented are presented below. Table 1 shows the eligibility assessment of the chosen articles against four inclusion criteria.

  • HCI/ Human-Computer Interaction and Design thinking;

  • HCI/ Human-Computer Interaction and Design thinking review;

  • HCI/ Human-Computer Interaction review;

  • Design thinking review;

  • HCI/ Human-Computer Interaction design process;

  • Design thinking process;

  • Design process;

  • Comparison of HCI/ Human-Computer Interaction and Design thinking process.

Articles included in the review are denoted with * in the reference list at the end of the paper. Key characteristics of the articles are summarized below:

  • The oldest article was published in 1972, and the newest in 2017. Seventy-eight percent of the reviewed articles were published in the last 10 years.

  • The rate of HCI related papers were 46% and DT related articles were 51% for this study.

  • Half of HCI papers (61%) were focused on design research and practice, and Majority of DT articles (92%) reporting the design thinking process and its impact and value were published in the last 30 years.

  • Only 5.5% of studies focused on both HCI and DT in the last 10 years.

  • Eighteen percent of the articles reported studies on process either HCI or DT.

In total, 72 papers published between 1972 and 2017 were considered in this study. Our major journal resources included Design Studies, Design Issues, and Computers in Human Behavior. We also included HCII and CHI papers, which are well-known international conferences in the HCI domain. In this study, 22 published journals, 26 peer-reviewed conference papers, 15 books, 3 magazine articles, 5 articles from design and HCI research organizations, and 1 technical report were involved. In results analysis phase, 72 studies were reviewed again and categorized based on their major themes or issues.

4.3 Results Analysis

Collectively, articles were found to reflect on design viewpoints on the nature of design processes taking place in the two domains: engineering, design, education, healthcare, etc.

Understanding of HCI design process is critical as it is becoming core aspect of system development process to improve and enhance systems and to satisfy users’ needs and necessities. Having a clarity about this process will likely allow the stakeholders to be on the same page regarding the criteria to follow and the setting the expected outcomes from the HCI design team. Table 3 presents HCI process steps and the keywords used to define each phase, from the paper reviewed in this study. A description and taxonomy of the variations, success factors, and practices were reported. Some process models are focused on engineering design [14, 64] whereas others’ emphasis is more on interaction design [62], and user-centered design process.

Table 3. A comparison of HCI design process models.
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There were notable findings from the six models in Table 1. The models suggested to understand requirements, generate designs that reach the requirements, and evaluate selected design. These commonalities among the models emphasizes designing computer systems that support people so that they can carry out their activities productively and safely, and understanding and creating software and other technology that people will want to use, will be able to use, and will find effective when used [37]. In other words, HCI process supports users in terms of achieving their goals successfully [37]. Although the process titles across the models vary, when looked at the descriptions and key purposes, the objective to achieve in each step were alike.

Table 4 shows the eight models commonly referred to in the literature when DT process was applied or described. Some models grouped several steps [1, 10, 50] instead of listing all phases, but the basic purposes and concept of steps were the same. The eight models demonstrated that DT not only focuses on user-centeredness through understanding users with empathy but also pursues possible solutions with creative and innovative approaches. Creative design activities like abstraction laddering, mapping techniques including journey mapping and concept mapping, low-fidelity prototyping and various visualization and communication techniques were suggested to generate and explore solutions. Although only three models [10, 33, 50] described Implement phase, they highlighted the importance of translating ideas (solutions) into the user’s world, successfully (Fig. 1), (Table 2).

Table 4. A comparison of design thinking process models.
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Fig. 1.
figure 1

HCI design process [19].

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5 Commonalities, Differences, and Lessons Between HCI and DT Processes

We detailed the results of the systematic review analysis regarding our three research questions, as follows. The notable findings from the result were reported in Table 5.

Table 5. Commonalities, differences, and lessons between HCI and DT processes.
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Overall, the two processes showed similarities to discover and solve the problem with iterative process. Particularly, prototype phase presented the same purpose to change idea (solution) into interactive systems. Although there are commonalities, the two domains illustrated dissimilarities that HCI and DT processes pursued different perspectives to approach their goals in each phase excepting prototype. Commonalities and differences of two processes showed potential possibilities to integrate and support each other (Fig. 2).

Fig. 2.
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Design thinking process [55].

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5.1 How Do HCI and DT Design Processes Overlap?

HCI design and DT processes shared similar goals and steps in their processes: understanding and observing users to determine problems, ideation, and prototyping and testing as well as pursuing iteration process for refining ideas [16, 72]. Figure 3 presents a visualized diagram of the steps that are involved in overlapped HCI and DT processes. Although HCI and DT’s concepts of the first step were different, recommended techniques were rather close to each other: observing users directly and indirectly, conducting field studies, interviewing, video-recording to understand users, discovering user’s needs, developing relevant knowledge, and detecting problems [10, 19, 33, 35, 50, 55].

Fig. 3.
figure 3

Overlapped HCI and DT processes.

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Particularly, the prototype step targeted the same objective for both HCI and DT: transferring ideas or concept solutions into tangible forms [33]. The major goal of prototype is to discover the best ideas that can be a solution of problem and respond to the users’ needs through evaluating a design [19, 35]. Early prototyping is achieved through inexpensive and simple materials to communicate the concept [10, 19, 35, 55] then, software version was considered if it is necessary [19].

5.2 How Does the HCI Design Process Differ from DT Design Process?

Although overall processes of HCI and DT showed similarities, each step described different principles. The first phase in HCI process is often referred to as the process to understand users as requirements [19, 62]. However, DT process stressed building empathy with the users, rather than using the knowledge built to create requirements to inform the rest of the process [1, 17, 35, 50, 55]. The second step of HCI is analysis [19, 62] while this phase is often referred to as define in DT process [1, 17, 35, 50, 55]. Although first phases function alike, analysis is described as detailed examination of the elements as a basis for further interpretation, whereas define phase includes problem framing-structuring-iterating activities in order to interpret the insights gathered from the user.

HCI used term design as the third step, which can be considered as a main stage to move from what is wanted to how to do it [19]. To build interactive design, HCI as a profession requires to follow rules and guidelines, including Shneiderman’s eight golden rules, Norman’s seven and Nielsen’s 10 design principles, and heuristics [19]. On the other hand, DT uses the term ideate [1, 10, 35, 50, 53] which facilitates design iterations encouraging to search for possible solutions through creative design thinking tools to explore the solution space in full capacity [1, 10, 35, 50, 53, 55]. Prototype step did not show any differences between the two domains.

The last step, implementation, in HCI calls for preparing code, hardware, and relevant documents and manuals that’d go into a ‘real’ system [19]. DT refers to this phase as testing for transforming the design solution to user’s life (human) [50] through marketplace [10]. In summary, although the process steps are very much alike between the two domains, the emphasis for HCI process is on analyzing, evaluating and testing the solutions, DT process relies heavily on users’ perceptions of the artefact through deep observation and inquiries [10] with holistic view and innovative approaches [16, 52, 65, 72].

5.3 What Are the Lessons HCI and DT Could Learn from Each Other’s Process?

HCI and DT’s similar and different process (see Fig. 3) perspectives allow to integrate and support each other. As an initial step of what is wanted, empathize, and define from HCI and DT process share the similar techniques such as interviewing and observing [19, 35, 50, 55] to understand their target users and current problems. However, they have different concepts to study their users. This gap can provide opportunity to support each other. HCI can learn from DT as it places the user in the center and heavily relies on building empathy. Since empathy can bring creative ideas and input various experiences into different user groups, it would support HCI design, which focuses on collecting data as requirement [39] to have creative approach.

Analysis step of HCI would be interrelated with define step as well. The role of analysis in HCI and define in DT is to analyze the result of user observations and interviews and other contextual data gathered to define and discover insights and the issues [19, 35, 53, 55] to understand user group. Analysis in HCI can learn from DT’s focus on design ethnography and mapping technology [53] discovering problems and context, method of encouraging and inspiring teams, and building criteria for selecting best ideas to evaluate [55].

Design phase of HCI and ideate stage of DT could easily be morphed into each other. Design phase in HCI requires following the principles and guidelines that are standardized for HCI process across diverse practitioners [19]. Whereas ideate phase in DT doesn’t follow guidelines; however, it focuses on exploring the solution space in depth while generating many alternatives as potential solutions to the problem at hand, without evaluating [55]. In this scenario, the design phase in HCI could practice similar creative approaches with the goal of generating diverse solutions instead of heavily relying on principles and standards, and DT could practice systematic ideation steps and potentially explore principles to follow for certain design cases, through adopting guidelines and standards.

For the overall design process, HCI and DT considered different aspects to solve problems. DT’s non-linear process allows to refine diverse set of concepts [72] while promoting innovativeness [16]. In addition, the holistic approach of DT offers possibilities to generate several potential solutions with broad perspectives in different ways, whereas non-holistic aspect of HCI is restricted to generate solutions in various viewpoints [65, 66]. These different perspectives can encourage HCI to learn DT’s innovative non-linear process-oriented method with holistic approach [9, 10, 20, 35, 52, 55, 65, 67] to enhance entire HCI design process.

6 Conclusion

Human-computer interaction, as a discipline, addresses human-centeredness and collaboration of cross-disciplinary fields [6, 16, 25, 26, 42, 51, 62] to understand users and contextual use of solutions [16, 62]. However, rapidly changing technology generates challenges to HCI practice such as fail to introduce updated design for new product [16, 17, 28]. Design Thinking process has been widely used as an innovative and user-oriented approach [9, 10, 67] to solve wicked problems with many diverse applications [11, 12, 16, 38, 58]. Overall, HCI and DT shared similar steps with iterative process: understanding and observing users to determine problems, designing/ideation, prototyping and testing. However, each step has specific principles, determining the tools to use, and the goals to achieve. HCI requires understanding users to build requirements, applying design rules and principles for design, and focuses largely on designing software. On the contrary, DT highlights building empathy to understand users, design activities to generate ideas/solutions, and encourages the solutions to be translated into user’s life. This study suggests that although the two disciplines follows alike procedures, there are lessons each can take and apply from the other.