Alternative Titles for the Special Issue
- Usability by Law? What Regulation Can (and Cannot) Do for Human-Centered Design
- Accessible by Law, Usable by Chance?
Since June 2025, the European Accessibility Act (together with its national implementations, such as the German Barrierefreiheitsstärkungsgesetz) requires a wide range of digital products and services to be accessible. And the EAA is not alone: consumer law treats digital services that do not work as expected as defective, data protection law demands that privacy settings be transparent and understandable, and the Digital Services Act bans manipulative interface design. Digital services, it seems, have never been more thoroughly regulated. So are they finally becoming usable? Not necessarily. Anyone who has stood in front of a ticket machine knows that a service can comply with every single regulation and still fail the person standing in front of it. Accessibility is mandated, contracts must be honored, dark patterns are banned; usability itself, however, remains largely a matter of good will rather than binding obligation. In our view, this points to a question that has received surprisingly little systematic attention: Is there a right to usability; and if not, do we need one?
Digital systems have been pervading our everyday lives for a long time. The very early systems often were initially developed by experts for special applications, to fly to the moon, to network banks internationally. Gradually, digital systems have become part of our everyday (professional) lives: digital documents for business correspondence, the goods management system of a logistics company, the checkout system for a retailer, the flight booking system for international airlines. With the enormous developments of the Internet and the World Wide Web, the availability of wireless communication and miniaturization, we have entered the digital age, a kind of digital gold rush. Everything is possible, everything is networked, everything is always accessible. In the past 20 years, digital systems have entered our lives everywhere: when we communicate, when we shop, when we travel, when we work, when we learn, and even when we play sports. In other words, everywhere.
Despite the long experience in developing interactive systems, in practice we still find many examples where IT user interfaces are developed without people in mind. These poorly designed systems can lead to many unexpected problems.
The research field Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) is situated at the intersection of computer science, behavioral sciences, design, media studies, anthropology, and several other fields. The field focuses on the human side of interactions with computer systems so that we have the best possible experience when “communicating” with machines. In addition to scientific results as nicely categorized by Wobbrock J. & Kientz J. (interactions 23, 3, 2016) there are results from the field aimed at practitioners, like the eight golden rules for successful Human-Computer interaction listed by Ben Shneiderman in his book “Designing the User Interface” (first published in 1987). The important sets of rules developed for decades in research and practice are not least anchored in inter/national standards, e.g. ISO 9241-210:2019 (Ergonomics of human-system interaction–Part 210: Human-centered design of interactive systems (ISO 9241-210:2019); German version EN ISO 9241-210:2019)). The application of ISO standards for the design of interactive systems can nowadays be considered a standard procedure.
However, there are still many systems that fail usability. It can be stated that access to digital offerings is still in need of improvement. In our opinion, however, this is not so much due to a lack of methods, concepts or rules. It is more due to the fact that the development processes are not sufficiently oriented to the real everyday living or working practice of people. Practice- and user-oriented research must be given much more focus. This requires a better understanding of participatory and interdisciplinary approaches, and it needs more space and time for processes of understanding. More understanding is needed of how rules and regulations can be combined with suitable procedural methods to ultimately design IT products that provide users with positive support in their everyday life and work.
For this special issue of i-com our goal is to collect work from different disciplines on how usability guidelines and laws are used and built – what laws there are and what we know about success and failure of applying them in practice – findings about the Effect of Usability Laws and Guidelines. We both ask for full scientific papers (e.g. describing case studies) and short position statements (of just two or a few more pages) that contribute to the topic.
Topics to address in submissions can be (but are not limited to):
- Overview of laws on usability – and their effect on projects – comparison between countries
- (case) studies about the effect of laws on usability and accesibility on and/or design(UX) practice guidelines
- (case) studies about success or failure of applying UX to projects in praxis
- How design teams work with rules (e.g. the role of laws, standards, guidelines in day-to-day UX practice)
- HCI perspectives on dark patterns: What regulation can(not) capture
- Testing, measuring and enforcing usability (compliance, auditing & certification)
- Development of usability laws and guidelines
- Comparative perspectives on usability regulation across countries
- Studies on how UX is considered in different branches (e.g. public administration)
- Studies on the Return on Investment of UX
- Legal and interdisciplinary perspectives on a “right to usability”
Guest Editors
- Susanne Boll (Universität Oldenburg)
- Michael Koch (Universität der Bundeswehr München)
- Simon Nestler (Technische Hochschule Ingolstadt (THI))
Submission / Important Dates
The special issue will be distributed over two issues of i-com – Issue 3 in Volume 25 (2026) and Issue 1 in Volume 26 (2027)
- Submission Deadline: 1.10.2026 (for Volume 25) and 1.2.2027 (for Volume 26)
- Notification of acceptance for Volume 25: 15.10.2026
- Submission of final Version for Volume 25: 15.11.2026
All submissions must be in English and should represent the original work of the authors with a length of 3.000-10.000 words. Substantially improved or extended versions of papers previously published in conference proceedings are welcome, provided that no copyright limitations exist.
For information about how to submit manuscripts, see https://i-com-journal.org/calls/ – Regarding Article Processing Fees, the publisher is calling for published articles: We will provide waivers for the APC for articles published in this Special Issue if your institution does not have an APC agreement with the publisher.