Making Abstraction Concrete: A Design Space and Interaction Model of Abstraction in Interactive Systems
For HCI researchers and designers, this work provides a conceptual framework to understand and design abstractions in interactive systems, addressing a gap in existing models.
The paper surveys 457 papers to synthesize a design space of abstraction techniques along six dimensions, and reframes the gulfs of execution and evaluation through a lens of abstraction to provide actionable guidance for designing abstractions in interactive systems.
The principle of abstraction guides the design of interactive systems, yet we lack a conceptual framework to understand how it shapes interaction design. Existing models, such as the gulfs of execution and evaluation, do not explicitly model abstractions in the system or in users' mental models, and therefore lack actionable guidance for designing abstractions. To investigate how abstractions are employed in interactive systems, we surveyed 457 papers and synthesized a design space of abstraction techniques along six dimensions. We use this design space to reframe the gulfs through a lens of abstraction, explicitly articulate the cognitive and design processes by which users and systems bridge and navigate the abstraction gap, and demonstrate how this model integrates existing perspectives and surfaces new opportunities for future systems.