[2] Primary activities of the HCIL include collaborative research, publication and the sponsorship of open houses, workshops and annual symposiums.

[3] Being interdisciplinary in nature, HCIL collaborates on a broader basis with several academic departments and schools, with faculty and students from Information Studies, Computer Science, Education, English, Business, and Psychology.

[2] Research affiliated with the HCIL has led to several digital design principles based on Shneiderman's theory of direct manipulation.

[8] Information visualization research on dynamic queries in the early 1990s led to the commercial Spotfire product[9] and treemapping strategies.

[12] Later contributions include technology design methodologies for children, mobile and pen-based computing, network analysis and visualization using NodeXL, and event analytics[13] for electronic patient histories.

[2] Ben Shneiderman's theory of direct manipulation led to innovations in digital interface design, many developed under the HCIL.

Direct manipulation is characterized by four main principles: continuous representation of the object of interest; physical actions instead of complex syntax; rapid, incremental, and reversible operations whose impact on the object of interest is immediately visible; and layered or spiral approach to learning that permits usage with minimal knowledge.

File abstractions, for instance, can be dragged and dropped into folders to manage and organize programs in an intuitive and visual manner.

[21] Using direct manipulation interfaces through touchscreens, HCIL worked on two projects from 1988 to 1989: development of a home automation system in collaboration with American Voice and Robotics,[22] and experimentation with toggles (buttons, sliders, etc.)