Résumé
I am a user experience (UX) researcher with 10 years’ experience in human-computer interaction, specializing in the areas of EdTech and open-source software development. My research creates technologies and practices that help people have more reliable and satisfying working relationships.
User Experience Research: I led user experience evaluations of tools and practices designed to address real-world challenges like onboarding newcomers to remote software teams and promoting trust among co-workers. Through moderated user testing, surveys, and interviewing, I showed that these tools and practices achieved their goals with high usability and produced satisfying user experiences.
Leadership and Result Reporting: I generated new research projects, scoped out research programs, and planned the time and resources necessary to complete them. I presented executive summaries of the findings to my managers and fellow researchers. In addition, I published the results in numerous first-rate academic conferences such as Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW).
PROJECTS
Teaching master’s degree-level students to program user interfaces using a user-centered approach
Pratt Institute – Visiting Assistant Professor 2017-Present
Goal: Give students practical hands-on experience with creating and usability testing user interfaces
Method: Through a mix of lectures and hands-on activities, I educate students on the impact UX research has on user interface design and implementation.
Improving satisfaction among e-mentored software engineering students by increasing their engagement and enhancing Google Summer of Code’s learning platform
Carnegie Mellon University – Post-Doctoral Research Associate 2013-2017
Goal: Understand how a task (as defined by a student and their mentor) impacts how well that student builds technical skills and makes personal connections to members of the community
Method: I created the interview protocol and led analysis of 30 transcripts. I initiated weekly meetings with the team to discuss emerging results and manage project progress. Nearing an academic paper deadline, I delegated further interview recruiting to teammates to make progress on the paper.
Result: The paper was accepted for publication at ICSE 2017, the top conference in software engineering. It offered practical guidance to e-mentoring platform designers wishing to enhance student engagement, e.g., having pairs of students review each other’s code, scheduling progress reports around project milestones for students to receive recognition from the community.
Improving satisfaction and trust in online communities of developers and users
Carnegie Mellon University – Post-Doctoral Research Associate 2013-2017
Goal: Promote satisfaction in diverse teams of scientific software developers and end users
Method: I designed the research study and supervised data collection of over 60 remote and face-to-face interviews, 200 surveys, and over 23 hours of in situ observations. I mentored a junior researcher on the team in qualitative coding and affinity diagraming.
Result: The study resulted in a peer-reviewed publication at ICSE 2017, showing people who use brainstorming in their teams are more satisfied with their team’s process and their outcome.
Promoting trust among remote workers, particularly in multinational corporations
University of California, Irvine – Graduate Student Researcher 2005-2013
Goal: Promote interpersonal trust between members of globally distributed software teams
Method: I moderated 40 user tests of a software prototype designed to promote trust by displaying detailed information about a remote collaborator’s availability and responsiveness. I measured users’ perceived trustworthiness of a collaborator across several conditions, and the usability of the prototype.
Result: Users made significantly better trustworthiness judgments (compared to without the prototype) and reported that it was highly usable (84% on SUS questionnaire). These findings were incorporated into a publication at CSCW 2013, which I co-wrote with 3 researchers on my team.
Conducting user experience research to increase sales by 12% and optimize production line
WallStreet University, Inc. – Course Designer 2004-2009
Goal: Increase customer conversation rates of an online investor education course
Method: I proposed to my manager that we needed to move a call to action button outside a body of text product webpage on. I created a version of the webpage with the call to action below the body copy and ran A/B tests to compare the effectiveness of these two versions.
Result: Within 30 days we had a 12% increase in course sales through the new version of the webpage. My result persuaded management to initiate A/B testing in the company.
Developing an enhanced file sharing tool for Microsoft internal research groups
Microsoft – Summer Research Intern 2009
Goal: Allow members of Microsoft research groups to selectively sync files across their teams’ devices
Method: I built a C# application on top of Cimbiosys—a file replication platform—that replicated papers and references among all Microsoft research group members’ devices, but only replicated individuals’ annotations on their private devices.
Result: The tool was presented to the researchers who decided to keep it for their future use.
TECHNIQUES, TOOLS, AND PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES
UX Methods: Interviewing, Survey Design and Implementation, Heuristic Evaluation, Cognitive Walkthrough, Prototyping, Wireframing, Think-Aloud Protocol, Usability Testing, A/B Testing, Information Visualization
Data Analysis: Quantitative Analysis (R, SPSS), Qualitative Analysis (Dedoose, ATLAS.ti), SQL
EDUCATION
Ph.D., Information & Computer Science Irvine, CA, USA
University of California, Irvine
M.S., Information & Computer Science Irvine, CA, USA
University of California, Irvine
B.S., Information & Computer Science Irvine, CA, USA