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From User-Centered to Adoption-Centered Design: A Case Study of an HCI Research Innovation Becoming a Product

Published: 18 April 2015 Publication History

Abstract

As we increasingly strive for scientific rigor and generalizability in HCI research, should we entertain any hope that by doing good science, our discoveries will eventually be more transferrable to industry? We present an in-depth case study of how an HCI research innovation goes through the process of transitioning from a university project to a revenue-generating startup financed by venture capital. The innovation is a novel contextual help system for the Web, and we reflect on the different methods used to evaluate it and how research insights endure attempted dissemination as a commercial product. Although the extent to which any innovation succeeds commercially depends on a number of factors like market forces, we found that our HCI innovation with user-centered origins was in a unique position to gain traction with customers and garner buy-in from investors. However, since end users were not the buyers of our product, a strong user-centered focus obfuscated other critical needs of the startup and pushed out perspectives of non-user-centered stakeholders. To make the research-to-product transition, we had to focus on adoption-centered design, the process of understanding and designing for adopters and stakeholders of the product. Our case study raises questions about how we evaluate the novelty and research contributions of HCI innovations with respect to their potential for commercial impact.

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  1. From User-Centered to Adoption-Centered Design: A Case Study of an HCI Research Innovation Becoming a Product

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    CHI '15: Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
    April 2015
    4290 pages
    ISBN:9781450331456
    DOI:10.1145/2702123
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Published: 18 April 2015

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    Author Tags

    1. adoption-centered design
    2. commercialization
    3. dissemination
    4. productization
    5. research impact
    6. technology transfer

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    April 18 - 23, 2015
    Seoul, Republic of Korea

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    CHI '15 Paper Acceptance Rate 486 of 2,120 submissions, 23%;
    Overall Acceptance Rate 6,199 of 26,314 submissions, 24%

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    • (2024)Mission Statement on the Higher Education System in Colombia and Its Relationship With Its QualityHigher Education and Quality Assurance Practices10.4018/979-8-3693-6765-0.ch006(159-190)Online publication date: 20-Dec-2024
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