The Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Human–Computer Interaction Empirical Research.

This article examines the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on empirical research methodologies within the human–computer interaction (HCI) field by analyzing papers from The ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI) editions of 2021 and 2022. It identifies four main pandemic-related influences on HCI research: changes in experiment procedures (notably a shift to remote or blended methods using communication technologies like Zoom), participant recruitment and behavior, apparatus usage, and other miscellaneous effects. The study found that 23% of CHI 2021 papers and 36% of CHI 2022 papers reported pandemic influences, with a smaller subset directly addressing COVID-19-related topics such as health, education, entertainment, psychology, communication, and privacy/security. Comparisons with pre-pandemic data indicate that while research procedures adapted significantly, the number of participants in studies did not decline, suggesting researchers effectively transitioned to remote methodologies during the pandemic.