I have more than 15 years of research experiences using a wide variety of methods, including surveys, experiments, A/B testing, telemetry/behavioral data mining, social network analysis and visualization, interviews, focus groups, and ethnography. Drop me a line at shencuihua AT gmail dot com.
My consulting portfolio spans two technology domains: digital games and social media.
By tracking the motivation trends and game preferences, broken down by player age and gender, we create a detailed player profile report to inform game design and marketing decisions. My team developed the widely-cited Trojan Player Typology, one of the most comprehensive gamer motivation typologies. This typology was developed for many game genres, including MMORPG and MOBA, and successfully applied to markets in both North America and East Asia.
Not all players are equally valuable. Using innovative social network analysis methods, we identify influential players who positively influence others' join, play and purchase decisions. Such player influence analysis can inform marketing and retention decisions.
We develop data-driven models to automatically identify toxic behaviors and toxic players. These models help us identify "high-risk" areas of toxicity and improve game design (player leveling, tutorial, mentorship, team matching, etc) and also "high-risk" individuals and teams to be flagged and quarantined, to improve community climate and player experience.
Combining behavioral data and psychometric surveys, we can establish data-driven users profiles that depict user demographics (age, gender, location, etc) and personality with high precision. These user profiles will inform product design, algorithmic filtering and target advertising.
"Fake news" has been a persistent and pervasive problem on social media. My team has produced data-driven solutions to identify, insulate, and counteract misinformation in textual and visual formats, in both political and health domains.
Through the analysis of activity logs and the social networks among participants, my research could empirically measure the "health" of online communities, identify key opinion leaders as well as trolls, inform product and interface design to foster sustained engagement.