HCI and SE - The cultures of the professions

The author reviewed and participated in several exemplar industry projects from the Indian IT industry to study the integration of human-computer interaction (HCI) design into software development by Indian software vendors. While several problems occurred because HCI skills were either not used, or were not used early enough in a project, or when the HCl professional lacked process support to carry out all HCI activities in the project, at least some of the problems occurred because of the cultural differences between the professions of designers and engineers. In the one case where HCI professionals were indeed used early and with a multi-disciplinary team, the results were positive. The case studies point to a greater need to integrate HCI into existing software engineering process models with commonly accepted roles, activities and deliverables leading to mutual respect between professions