Portfolio
As a media psychologist, I investigate the fragmentation of life experience by researching how people interact with media such as self-driving cars, virtual reality, looping videos, enterprise applications, and web browsers to manage their lives. I employ quantitative and qualitative methods in conjunction with design thinking to create engaging experiences that people love.
Self-driving cars
At Waymo (formerly the Google self-driving car project), I led user experience research in understanding and designing for current and future ways that people and self-driving cars interact with each other. My design insights directly inform areas such as ride experience, passenger happiness, and novel human-robot communication.
Fragmentation of experience
My research at Stanford University investigates the fragmentation of digital life by studying how and when people multitask with media. As computers and smart phones become dominant sources of a greater range of content, an entire day can be experienced on a screen, from social interactions to work to errands and entertainment. This work combines new methods to capture screen recordings and behavioral data in studying how people sequence media content in creating unique threads of digital experience.
-
Selected publications:
- The Fragmentation of Work, Entertainment, E-Mail, and News on a Personal Computer: Motivational Predictors of Switching Between Media Content
- Multitasking on a single-device: Arousal and the frequency, anticipation, and prediction of switching between media content on a computer
Virtual reality
At Stanford's Virtual Human Interaction Lab (VHIL), my research investigated the effects of interaction with virtual avatars on subsequent real world behavior. In one study, the effects of interacting with one's future self in order to visualize the future were shown to greatly increase the probability of accepting later monetary awards over immediate ones. Another study found that just the perception that a virtual avatar was controlled by a human led to greater social influence than the perception that it was controlled by a computer.
Six second looping videos, browsers, and space
At Vine (acquired by Twitter), I established the user research team to understand the psychology of six second looping videos and their impact on digital culture.
At Mozilla, my research on Firefox focused on exploring the relationship between psychological factors of user behavior and browser usage patterns, such as multitasking. It culminated in a behavioral segmentation study of browser users, resulting in a user typology of attitudes, beliefs, and cognitions.
And at NASA, I prototyped a mixed human-robot controlled interface to be used by astronauts in operating the carbon dioxide removal system (CDRS) on the International Space Station.