i-com Special Issue “The Effect of Usability Laws and Guidelines”
Alternative titles:
- 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?
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.