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of NNG e-commerce usability standards in 2002, and this was up from only 45 percent in 2000
(Lang, 2002). In fact, the highest scoring e-commerce Web site followed only 66 percent of the
e-commerce standards in 2002 (Nielsen, 2002). This was further substantiated by Webster and
Ahuja (2006), who found that only 34 percent of the popular Web sites had site maps; 77 percent
had navigation links on all pages; and 70 percent had consistent displays.
Given that even the most popular Web sites fail to consistently follow design guidelines, one
can argue that HCI research is not currently informing organizational applications at an accept-
able rate. There may be two reasons for this phenomenon. Developers of applications and/or
products may not find HCI research to be helpful or relevant. For example, if the research suffers
from weak methodology and/or theoretical foundations, then it may be difficult to interpret its
results. Second, organizational members, such as marketers and application developers, may not
know enough about HCI to follow development standards or even know that development stan-
dards exist. Therefore, there appears to be a disconnection between HCI researchers, HCI knowl-
edge and training in organizations, and marketplace needs.
In today's fast-paced economy, HCI and usability practitioners are calling for relevance in HCI
research (Czerwinski et al., 2003) and the marketplace continues to call for well-designed inter-
faces. HCI has been criticized for its lack of sensitivity to business issues, and this has been cred-
ited with holding HCI back from realizing its potential as a discipline (Gray and Salzman, 1998;
Zolli, 2004). It is now becoming clear that HCI research and education are not regularly produc-
ing research that is tied to business and/or marketplace needs and are not developing HCI curric-
ula that are sufficiently applied in organizations.
In response to these concerns, this paper makes the simple argument that human-computer inter-
action's natural home is not within psychology or computer science, but within business schools. To
justify this argument, this paper will: first, review the differences between discipline-specific con-
ceptualizations of HCI; second, describe the current state of HCI research and education; third, dis-
cuss how business disciplines, and more specifically management information systems (MIS), can
contribute to HCI; and, finally, review the potential factors that may be holding MIS back from
making these contributions, concluding with a list of suggested solutions to these challenges.
MULTIPLE CONCEPTUALIZATIONS OF HCI
Computer science and psychology are viewed as the intellectual foundations of HCI. Both areas
study the interaction of the person and the technology, but incline toward their strengths in these
respective areas. For instance, psychologists tend to focus more on individual characteristics and
behaviors. An example of such an article would be one examining extroverts' and introverts' reac-
tions to computer-generated speech on Web sites (Nass and Lee, 2001). In psychology, HCI is
often called “human factors,” 1 and HCI researchers are supported by the American Psychological
Association's division of “Applied Experimental and Engineering Psychology.” This division
describes human factors as the “psychological principles relating human behavior to the design
and use of environments and systems within which people work and live” (APA, 2004).
Conversely, computer scientists focus more on developing technologies for the computer inter-
face. An example would be a recent study that examines different types of diagrams for informa-
tion structures, but does not take into account individual characteristics (Irani and Ware, 2003).
Computer scientists are supported by the Association for Computing Machinery's (ACM) special
interest group on computer-human interaction (SIGCHI) that describes CHI as “the design, eval-
uation, implementation, and study of interactive computing systems for human use.”
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