About Me
I am a doctoral student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, advised by Dr. Robert Capra. I have an interdisciplinary background in psychology, computer science, and information science. Before coming to UNC, I obtained my Master's degree from the School of Information at the University of Texas at Austin, advised by Dr. Jacek Gwizdka. I worked with Dr. Jacek Gwizdka to investigate and predict users' relevance judgment during web searches by using eye tracking and data mining techniques.
My research interests lie broadly in Human-Computer Interaction, Web Search, Creativity, Data Science, Eye Tracking, and Psychology. As a User Experience researcher, I use a wide variety of quantitative methods as well as qualitative methods to understand and model users’ behaviors and motivations for designing technologies that can better support people's everyday creativity.
Through my dissertation research, I seek to understand how people use search engines along with other technologies to support the creative process in their work and life. The dissertation project includes two parts: a survey study and a diary study. In the first part, an online survey with 175 participants was conducted to get a general understanding of how people use search engines and other existing information tools to support their everyday creativity tasks, the types of creative process stages that are involved in their tasks, and how they use different tools to support different creative stages. To get a deeper understanding of people's behaviors and their creative processes, in the second part, I conducted a two-week diary study to investigate users' in-situ search behaviors in their design-related projects.
