HCI, interaction design, marketing, e-commerce

Information and communication technology (ICT) is rapidly entering a mass-consumer market where more and more digital services and media are becoming available to anyone, anywhere and anytime.

This trend poses interesting challenges to the field of HCI, since, traditionally, HCI is aimed at optimizing task performance of, more or less, expert users. Sim D’Hertefelt [1] has argued that HCI has to face new challenges in that its traditional focus needs to be widened to include aspects typically found in the fields of marketing and sociology.

Already, HCI researchers and practitioners have started crossing the bridge to marketing. Interesting new fields, such as user experience strategy, the design of consumer trust [2] or Captology [3] are emerging.

The mass-consumerization of ICT also confronted the field of marketing, and especially consumer behaviour, with its own challenges. Traditionally, marketing has focused on the consumer’s purchase decision and the process around it. The actual interaction or value-creation with the product is, more or less, a black box. However, since "commerce" has adopted the letter "e", the black box has opened.

In e-commerce and its derivatives like: eRM (electronic relationship management), eBranding, 1-to-1 marketing, personalization, etc., the actual interaction with the consumer has become of paramount (and dollar) importance. Hence, the long awaited acknowledgement of usability by business management.

User, consumer,… in fact the same subject, yet mostly still different worlds. By necessity, however, the bridge has already been laid by interaction designers in their day-to-day projects. Needless to say that designers strongly support the dialogue between HCI and marketing, as this will lead to better design guidelines for e-commerce.

In this SIG, we want to bring together members of the fields of HCI, marketing and design to share experiences and knowledge that may eventually lead to models, design guidelines and heuristics that combine the best of both worlds.

We also want to discuss the possibilities of continuing the (international) dialogue and cooperation in this area.

Before CHI 2001:

• Send out a Call for Participation through several mailinglists (CHI-web, CHI-consultants, etc.)

At CHI 2001:

• kick-off presentation (10 minutes)
• presentations of thoughts, models, cases, etc. by selected participants (60 minutes, 4 to 6 presenters)
• discussion (20 minutes), proposed topics:
• is this dialogue useful?
• how to organize the continuous (international) exchange of ideas
• next steps for CHI 2002