How Do HCI Researchers Describe Their Software Tools Insights from a Synopsis Survey of Tools for Multimodal Interaction

Abstract

Providing tools to support design and engineering of interactive computing systems has been encouraged in the HCI community. However, little is known about the practices adopted by HCI researchers to describe their software tools in academic publications. To address this aspect, we implemented a simplified literature survey procedure combining principles of population sampling and systematic literature reviews to enable rapid access to insights from a vast body of published academic work. We report that screenshots and diagrams are among the most widely used descriptive elements by HCI researchers to present their software tools, a finding that we capitalize on to reflect about the dissemination of tools for the design and engineering of multimodal interaction at the intersection of software engineering and HCI.