I recently finished my Ph.D. in human-computer interaction at the University of British Columbia, where I explored the design and evaluation of personalized graphical user interfaces under the supervision of Dr. Joanna McGrenere. I am now working as a postdoctoral fellow with Dr. Jacob Wobbrock in the AIM Research Group at the University of Washington's Information School.
My research interests span a range of topics, including personalization, accessibility, information and communication technologies for development (ICTD), and large display interaction. I am particularly motivated to support users’ individual abilities and differences by drawing on the malleability of software interfaces. My dissertation research focused on personalized graphical user interfaces, contributing a new evaluation methodology for assessing both the costs and benefits of working in a personalized interface, and identifying application contexts and design choices that will best take advantage of these benefits. Supporting individual abilities is also a theme I have pursued in designing for individuals with acquired language impairments and for low literacy users.
Projects
I am currently working on adaptive interaction techniques for tabletop computing and on goal crossing to improve accessibility for motor-impaired users (Accessible Goal Crossing). Below are more advanced projects that I am also working on or have worked on in the past.
Personalized Graphical User Interfaces
My dissertation explored several aspects of working in both adaptive (automatic)
and adaptable (user-controlled) personalized graphical user interfaces. Personalization
can offer many performance and user satisfaction benefits. One potential drawback, however, is a negative impact on the user's awareness of the full set of features in the application. To assess this impact, I introduced two measures
of feature awareness that can be used in evaluations alongside more traditional performance measures.
Our findings show that personalized interfaces (including both layered interfaces and adaptive split menus) can negatively impact the user's ability to recognize features in the interface, and their performance when asked to complete new, unfamiliar tasks. While awareness is particularly important to consider for personalized interfaces, the measures should also be useful as one component of a learnability assessment of non-personalized interfaces.
My master’s thesis compared the efficiency of adaptive and adaptable split menus.
SELECTED PAPERS: CHI'04, Interact'07, CHI'08a, CHI'08b, CHI'09, IJHCS'09.
Information and Communication Technologies for Development (ICTD)
I am currently working on MultiLearn, a multiple input educational computer game for classrooms in low resource environments. I began working in ICTD in 2008 during an internship at Microsoft
Research India, where I primarily studied how to design for
users with different levels of literacy. The goal was to understand how
semi-literate users, who have some reading skill but are not fluent with written language, work with
multimodal interfaces.
SELECTED PAPERS: CHI'09, ICTD'09.
The Aphasia Project
The Aphasia Project is a multidisciplinary project with the goal of discovering how technology can be used to better support individuals with aphasia in completing everyday tasks such as cooking and scheduling. Aphasia is an acquired language deficit, resulting from brain trauma such as a stroke or tumor.