Zooming Out (Judy's Questions 8–10)

Chapter 2 Episode 7

8. Who cares? Implications.

9. Where are you going to publish? What are you going to do next?

10. What are you going to be doing in 5 years?

In the previous episode, you turned your results into findings that are both defensible and genuinely informative. The final three questions in the chain turn from the work itself to its position in the world: who your findings matter to (Q8), where you will publish and what you will do next (Q9), and how this project fits into your longer trajectory (Q10).

Q8: Who Cares? (Again)

“Who cares?” appears a second time in the chain, and I promise the repetition is not a mistake. Q2 asks you to identify the full landscape of stakeholders and understand the context comprehensively before kicking off the project. Q8, on the other hand, is about the impact and implications of your work.

It is important to clarify that you are never “solving” a research question. In mathematics, solving a problem means the problem has been perfectly understood and a solution — often a unique one — has been presented, so that no one else ever needs to reinvent the wheel for that problem. In scientific research, especially HCI, each piece of work you do is approaching a better solution, and the line of research does not end with you (obviously — as long as someone cites your work, their work is built on top of yours).

As a result, it is very important to think about the impact and implications of your work while drafting both the findings and the discussion sections. Who cares about your findings, and what actionable insights can those findings offer to help their work? For HCI research, your peer HCI researchers are certainly the people who care, but you should also be aware that there are more, for instance, researchers from other domains, practitioners, policymakers, and so on.

A strong discussion of implications connects your conclusions back to the people who care and explains how the findings change what we know about their situation, what practitioners can do differently, or what researchers should investigate next. Do not just toss out a generic list of future-work directions (e.g., “future research should explore…”), because anyone could create such a list without your study. Instead, dive deep into the knowledge and value that only your work brings to the community.

Q9: Where Are You Going to Publish?

Although this is listed as the ninth question, I would recommend thinking about the venue and the target community as early as possible. It should be an easy question if you chose your domain lens carefully in Q1 and your vocabulary matches your community, because then the venue decision is a natural extension of the choices you already made.

However, things can happen. It is not uncommon to encounter a situation where you have to retrofit your work for a venue different from the one you initially prepared for. Also, if the first submission does not go through, you may consider resubmitting it to a different venue with an earlier deadline. In such cases, you need to do your homework again and form a thorough understanding of the publications at the new venue — what type of framing and contribution they appreciate, and whether the paper format differs — so that you can better adapt your work to the target community.

The second half of Q9 asks what you are going to do next, and the answer should identify what your work opened up and what it left unresolved. A good “what next,” like a good discussion section in Q8, is very specific and directly connected to your work. It should name concrete questions that emerged from your findings and explain why they matter. A weak “what next” is a vague call for more research, which is not helpful or actionable at all.

Q10: What Are You Going to Be Doing in 5 Years?

Typically, students are not aware that they should be thinking about this question during the first couple of years of their PhD journey, unless they are aiming for an academic career. That said, it is always worth thinking about how your papers relate to one another and where the current project sits in your own storyline. Does this project build toward a research program you want to sustain? Does it develop expertise and skills you want to carry forward? Does it position you for the career you are aiming for? If the project does not connect to any longer trajectory, it may still be a good research project worth doing, but perhaps not the optimal one for building your career. It is an expensive lesson to realize, only in hindsight, that you have spent enormous effort getting many papers published without being able to form any connection among them.

I raise this question because I have seen students spend years on projects that made sense tactically (e.g., the fruit was low-hanging, the data was available, the collaboration was convenient, the deadline was near) but did not add up to a coherent direction when they looked back. The best time to ask Q10 is before you commit to a project, and the answer does not need to be a detailed five-year plan. It needs to be an honest assessment of whether this work moves you toward something you care about or just keeps you busy.

The Full Chain

At this point, you have walked through all ten questions in the motivation chain. Q1 through Q3 built your understanding of the problem, the stakeholders, and the landscape. Q4 and Q5 committed you to a grounded approach and concrete methods. Q6 and Q7 produced and interpreted results. Q8 through Q10 positioned the work for the people who care, the community you belong to, and the career you are building. The chain works because each answer builds on the ones before it, and it fails whenever a link is missing or forced. If you take one thing from this chapter, let it be this: whenever a project feels stuck, go back to the ten questions, find the one you cannot answer, and work on that.