Evangelos Karapanos (editor) - Advances in Longitudinal HCI Research (Human–Computer Interaction Series)

The HumanComputer Interaction Series, launched in 2004, publishes books that advance the science and technology of developing systems which are effective and satisfying for people in a wide variety of contexts. Titles focus on theoretical perspectives (such as formal approaches drawn from a variety of behavioural sciences), practical approaches (such as techniques for effectively integrating user needs in system development), and social issues (such as the determinants of utility, usability and acceptability).

HCI is a multidisciplinary field and focuses on the human aspects in the development of computer technology. As technology becomes increasingly more pervasive the need to take a human-centred approach in the design and development of computer-based systems becomes ever more important.

Titles published within the HumanComputer Interaction Series are included in Thomson Reuters' Book Citation Index, The DBLP Computer Science Bibliography and The HCI Bibliography.

More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/6033

This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG

The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

One could argue that most of our knowledge in HCI research is about the short term. A recent survey of empirical studies of nudging in HCI [].

Recent technological, policy, and market trends further highlight the importance of studying prolonged use. Already fifteen years ago, den Ouden and Brombacher [ of this book, these digital services and products collect vast amounts of data from us, such as photos, music listening behaviors, and other forms of behavioral data. How do we know their long-term side effects on our privacy, safety, and well-being? Our knowledge on the long-term impact of these technologies, and how to design for lasting positive effects, is often limited.

One could wonder: Should all research about the short versus long-term effects of interactive technology be longitudinal? For a research study to be characterized as longitudinal, it needs to take at least two measurements of the same variable at different points in time [].

However, a longitudinal design also entails a number of challenges, such as participant dropouts (panel attrition) or constructs becoming invalid over time as participants perceptions of them change (panel conditioning and construct validity), but also the high costs longitudinal studies imply (c.f. []. At the top level, one may distinguish between repeated cross-sectional, longitudinal, and retrospective designs.

Repeated cross-sectional designs differ from longitudinal, in that they recruit different participants in each data-gathering wave. For large surveys in social sciences, this is a typical procedure, for example when assessing the changes in opinion polls in politics over time. However, this approach can also be adapted to compare user groups, based on the assumption that the differences between groups resemble differences over time. For instance, one could measure user performance with users of different levels of expertise (e.g., novice versus expert users), or different lengths of ownership of a product. Given that one cannot study intra-individual change, such designs imply a risk of failing to control for external variation, and falsely attributing variation across the different user groups to the manipulated variable. Prmper et al. [] for instance highlighted this problem, by showing that different definitions of novice and expert users lead to varying results.