Projects

Research Statement

My research lies at the intersection of people, information, and technology. I utilize user-centered design and consumer-driven approaches to explore how people produce, gather, interpret, use, and share their personal data. My primary research interest is designing and developing technologies for behavioral change through understanding stakeholders’ experiences, workflow, and challenges. Thus far, my work can largely be divided into the following categories: 1) empowering stakeholders (i.e., increase stakeholders self-awareness and self-reflection), and 2) improving processes (i.e., healthcare interactions, and education). During my projects, I have focused on understudied or high-need research populations (e.g., older adults, patients, complex healthcare team members, students), and utilized human-centered design methods to address challenges regarding data production, sharing, and comprehension, as well as stakeholder interactions.

Empowering Stakeholders Through Exploration and Reflection

1. Lifelogger (Deployment Study)Motivation: College-life presents a plethora of possibilities for new social experiences, activities, and other prospects. It can be difficult for college-aged young adults to decide how to spend their time in an efficient, healthy, and personally beneficial fashion. Design: Using commercial sensor-based technology and semi-automated tracking to aid students’ awareness of, and reflection upon, their time. Implementation: Our back-end uses the Python Flask framework and OAuth 2, and the frontend uses JQuery library, AJAX, CanvasJS, and APIs. Method: Day re-construction method, semi-structured interview, and survey.Result: Through iterative design process, we found that aligning time with location could trigger deeper reflection. When this was then combined with a whole day time percentage breakdown, it increased user satisfaction and perceived system usefulness.
Publication:Day Re-construction: Understanding How College Students Manage Their Time Through Self-monitoringHICSS'19 | PDF | Presentation | GitHub

2. Visualized Self (Usability testing )Motivation: Most self-tracking tools lack support for self-reflection beyond providing simple feedback. We want to help people engage with and gain insights from their own data. Design: We have designed a web-based aggregated personal data platform called "Visualized Self" to supports the full spectrum of self-monitoring data exploration (i.e., include collection, analysis, and sharing). We enabled users to import data streams from multiple tracking devices/apps (i.e., Fitbit, Moves, RescueTime, Microsoft Band, etc); these aggregated data was then displayed in one space for user comparison in order to facilitate self-reflection and behavioral pattern recognition.Implementation: The system was built using JavaScript; the back-end runs on node.js, CouchDB is used to organize user data on the server side, and the front-end is implemented with Flux architecture, which encapsulates the popular React.js framework. Method: Moderated in-lab usability testing, and think aloud protocol.Result: Insights gained from this aggregated data drastically increased user understanding of their own data, and increased user interest to continue using the the platform.
Publication:Understanding Self-Reflection: How People Reflect on Personal Data Through Visual Data ExplorationPervasiveHealth'17 | Acceptance rate: 25% | PDF | Presentation

3. Care-management Persona (Unsupervised learning)Motivation: Incorporating health personas for older adults into technology design processes can help designers to accurately represent older adults by evoking empathy, facilitating consideration of specific health issues and needs, and reducing reliance on general-purpose stereotypes. However, it is very costly to build personas through traditional qualitative method. Method: We utilized a two-level K-means clustering method to build a set of 4 care-management personas for U.S. older adults from 170,704 randomly sampled older adults in a national survey. Result: We synthesized results into persona narratives and provided a weighting scheme to quantitatively measure each persona’s significance. Our method is a feasible way to create personas, and it provides a cost-effective means of building personas from large publicly available datasets.
Publication:Creating Persona Skeletons from Imbalanced Datasets - A Case Study using U.S. Older Adults’ Health DataDIS'19 | Acceptance rate: 25% | PDF | Presentation | Github | Codebook

Improving Processes

1. Chef KoochoolooGoal: Our goals is to make Chef Koochooloo more effective for teaching students in K-5 classes STEAM (Science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics) and to foster global competency and food sustainability through healthy cooking. Method: Iterative design, UI design, observations, interviews, usability testing, survey.Outcome: Identified and prioritized key issues which hindered user experiences, improved the UI design and flow of user interactions.
App:Android | iOS

https://sites.google.com/site/hainingzhu0/SGLAs.png?attredirects=0

2. Small-group Learning Activity (Deployment Study)Motivation: Group learning typically require significant instructor effort, and supervision regarding group creation, resolving conflicts among members, provide feedback, and group process management, etc. Design: To make group learning more accessible to the instructors, we utilized a tool-centered approach, so that the instructor can supervises teamworks with a few buttons presses. Using theory-driven design, we designed and developed "SmartGroup" with the Django framework. SmartGroup supports various functions, including group formation, peer assessment, and adding a quality control role to supervise the peer assessments process. Implementation: We built our system using Django, HTML/CSS was used for the frontend, Jquery for the backend, Nginx as a web server, and PostgreSQL for the database.Method: Participatory design, semi-structured interview, and survey.
Publication:SmartGroup: A Tool-Based Approach to Scale-free Small-group Learning ActivitiesCSCW'18 Extended Abstract | PDF | Poster | Video | Website (Account: testing, Password: testing)

3. Prehabilitation Care Management (Formative Study - Deployment Study)Motivation: Habilitation services, notably prehabilitation and rehabilitation, are important components of patients’ surgical care. Contrary to traditional reactive healthcare models, proactive healthcare in the form of prehabilitation has shown promise in facilitating surgical patients’ recoveries beyond rehabilitation alone. Approach: My dissertation research intends to explore the following themes: 1) identifying pre-surgical challenges for surgical patients, 2) exploring how patients and clinicians currently perform prehabilitation, and 3) using data-driven design to develop and evaluate real-world healthcare applications intended to facilitate patients’ engagement.Implementation: Ionic FrameworkMethod: Observation, workflow modeling, semi-structured interview, forum analysis.
Publication:1. Understanding Challenges in Prehabilitation for Patients with Multiple Chronic Conditions PervasiveHealth'18 | Acceptance rate: 24% | PDF | Presentation 2. Multidisciplinary Care for Facial Paralysis Patients: Collaboration between Carers CSCW'18 Extended Abstract | PDF | Poster3. Healthcare Opportunities: Experts' Perspectives on Integrating Technology into Prehabilitation CSCW'18 Extended Abstract | PDF | Poster4. MyFace App | Video

4. Data Sharing (Formative Study)Motivation: People are tracking massive health data outside the clinic due to an explosion of wearable sensing and mobile health (mHealth) apps that support self-tracking. Although potential usefulness of self-tracking data is enormous, it is largely underutilized by patients and clinicians due to many obstacles. Method: Semi-structured interviews.Result: We found clinician initiated tracking are more likely to be used in clinical practices. So it is important to align clinician/patient perceptions by including clinicians in the early stages of patients’ tracking.

Publication:Sharing Patient-Generated Data in Clinical Practices: An Interview StudyAMIA'16 | The Distinguished Paper Nominee: Top 10% | PDF | Presentation

5. CBT-I (Exploratory Study)Motivation: Cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia (CBT-I) is an effective way to treat insomnia. However, the number of specialists who can provide CBT-I limits the number of patients who can receive it. Method: Clinic observations, and semi-structured interviews.Result: We build the CBT-I Workflow model, and identified its associated challenges.Findings: To enhance patients’ adherence, technology designers for CBT-I should consider designing to promote the following: encouraging patient socially shared or personally experienced success stories, supporting self-reflection, allowing for the sending of motivational messages, improving data collection accuracy, and providing timely patient-clinician communication.

Publication:Making Space for the Quality Care: Opportunities for Technology in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for InsomniaSIGCHI'17 | Acceptance rate: 25% | PDF | Presentation

Other Projects

1. Supporting Aging in PlaceMotivation: To cope with the global aging population trends, we want to investigate how older adults take the initiative role to support their own health and well-being. Method: Field observation, and semi-structured interview.Result: We found that older adults are naturally developing a network of connections, which we refer to as their "safety net". We have identified five social circles inside this safety net: pre-determined, chosen, interest-based, location-based, and shared-identity circles. Suggestions: Based on these findings, we suggest taking the safety net into consideration when designing technologies to promote and maintain healthy aging.
Publication:1. A Safety Net: How Older Adults Build and Maintain Interpersonal Relationships SIGCHI'18 Extended Abstract | PDF 2. Safety Net of Aging in Place: Understanding How Older Adults Construct, Develop, and Maintain Their Social Circles PervasiveHealth'18 | Acceptance rate: 24% | PDF

2. Civic engagement exploration (Design Thinking)Motivation: Data, big data, and data analytics are contemporary touchstones for rational and technocratic thinking about human activity. Data also provide a new foundation and focus for community innovation, and new concrete possibilities for enhancing community activities, experiences, and civic participation. What we did: We present and discuss a series of community design scenarios envisioning how community data can be produced, gathered, analyzed, interpreted and used by community members to enhance community awareness and engagement, to provide new opportunities for learning and development among community members, and to increase the transparency, effectiveness and fairness of local government. Conclusion: Our argument is that community data can be seen as a vehicle not only for more pervasive participation in local communities but also for richer, better-grounded, and more effective participation.
Publication:Strengthening Community Data: Towards Pervasive ParticipationDg.o'18 | PDFArt Festival State College (2017) | App

3. Facebook User Experience (Exploratory Study)This is a small but fun project I did in Nov. 2017, I used qualitative research methods to uncover the current Facebook user experience, and provide insight for improvement. The goal is to improve Facebook user experience. Towards this goal, I mined the readily available app reviews on google play, and then conducted participatory design with 5 participants to answer the following question: what is the current Facebook user experience like? What are challenges associated with Facebook’s core functionality, and how can we turn challenges into opportunities?

4. Stottlemyer Catalog (2013 - 2014)Although I have a strong inclination towards practical matters in UX research, I foster a strong appreciation for Fine Arts. On one occasion, I was able to combine my experience with Fine Arts and my skills from CS to be part of a team which designed, researched, catalogued and publicized a substantial and impressive collection of nearly 500 artworks for "The Stottlemyer Collection: A Journey." Many of these works were made by renowned American and European artists spanning the last four centuries.
I was able to design the entire book's layout using Adobe InDesign, and I wrote all the art critique papers in Chapter 8, Asian (Ukiyo-e) Prints. In the book, my art research is denoted at the end with my initials.
Publication:The Stottlemyer Collection: A Journey | 2014 | PDF

Page updated

Google Sites

Report abuse