The following research group descriptions are archived because they are no longer offered.

• Analyzing the Adult Oncology Patient Experience through Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) Engagement
• Designing Provider-Patient Messaging in Cancer and Depression Care
• Co-designing Breast Cancer Screening Outreach Tool for and with Black/African American women
• Evaluating Live Stream Chatbot
• Human-Centered Design to Eliminate Disparities in Breast Cancer Screening
• Exposing trails of misinformation: How did this content reach me?
• Analyzing and Supporting Twitter-Based Science Communication
• Implementing Mental Health Strategies in Everyday Life
• To reply or to quote?: Conversational frames on Twitter
• Implementing Mental Health Strategies in Everyday Life
• Design and Development for Crowdsourcing Physical Activity Advice
• Conversational Agent for Collecting Patient Information in Hospital Waiting Rooms
• Supporting Designers of Behavior Change Technologies
• Exploring Cues to Action in today’s Health & Wellbeing application market
• Friend and Crowdsourced Support for Behavior Change
• Coming to America: Building An App for International Students
• Beeswax: An App to Support Local Businesses
• An App to Help Assess and Track Noise Levels at Businesses and Venues
• Coming to America: Designing an Online Community for Immigrants
• Designing Digital Money
• Developing Motivators to Encourage Neighborhood Activism

Autumn 2023

Analyzing the Adult Oncology Patient Experience through Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) Engagement

We are looking for up to 6 dedicated students to join our Fall 2023 quarter Patient Experience Adult Oncology EDI Research Group, through a partnered effort with UW Medicine and Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center. The research group will be engaging underrepresented groups to understand the adult oncology experience today and how it may be improved.  

The findings from this study will influence future medical site planning, program design, and make improvements to current operations to improve equitable care for adult oncology patients. Students will:

1. Design interview guides fit for interview coding and analysis.
2. Conduct individual interviews with up to 40 different interviewees from 12 different underrepresented groups.
3. Analyze the qualitative and quantitative results into a research paper.

This study serves as a foundational commitment to the practice of active community EDI engagement to improve the health of the public. This opportunity would be for students with interests in health equity, qualitative coding/analysis, and experience design. 

This is a 2-credit DRG offered to undergraduate (HCDE 496) and graduate (HCDE 596) students. Students in this DRG will be required to attend 1 hour-long weekly meetings (TBD), and are expected to spend 3 to 5 additional hours weekly outside of meetings contributing to their work in the DRG.

This DRG is in collaboration with Gary Hsieh, Elizabeth Fleming, and Nida Shekhani (Chief Strategy Officers, UW Medicine and Fred Hutch Cancer Center) and will be advised by Paula Houston, Chief Equity Officer, UW Medicine and Dr. Leo Morales, Professor and Assistant Dean in the Office of Healthcare Equity, UW School of Medicine. This DRG is at capacity for Autumn 2023 and no longer accepting applications.. 

Depression is common but under-treated in patients with cancer. Although support for management of co-morbid cancer and depression has been proposed through integration of psychosocial care into cancer services and through technology to support such care models, challenges remain in designing appropriate and usable technology interventions that meet the needs of the patients and their care team. Because patients with co-morbid cancer and depression struggle to navigate between their cancer care and psychosocial care journeys, traditional psychosocial approaches and mental health technologies need to be adapted to these experiences.

The UW SCOPE study (Supporting Collaborative Care to Optimize Psychosocial Engagement in the Cancer Setting) is designing and developing a new web-based patient-provider platform for technology-enhanced Collaborative Care Management of depression in urban and rural cancer centers.

This DRG will focus on designing and iterating a one way messaging feature for the SCOPE app. This DRG will be done in collaboration with Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center.

We are looking for 3-4 students experienced in UI/UX design, familiarity with Figma or design application is recommended. DRG students will attend a 1 hour-long meeting weekly (date and time TBD) with additional work outside of scheduled meetings for 3 hours per credit. This will be a 2 credit DRG (e.g., 2 hours of meetings/co-design sessions + 4 hours of outside work = 2 CR).

This DRG will be facilitated by CSE PhD student Tae Jones with guidance from Associate Professor Gary Hsieh. For any questions, reach out to Tae at taejones@cse.washington.edu or on the DUB Slack.

Spring 2023

Co-designing Breast Cancer Screening Outreach Tool for and with Black/African American women

Disparities in breast cancer among Black women have been recognized for decades, and yet persist. In 2020, breast cancer screening rates in the UW health system were 61.5% among Black women compared to 73.3% among white women. In this project, we previously conducted qualitative research to understand barriers and facilitators to breast cancer screening, and how a chatbot outreach tool might spread awareness to facilitate early detection and improve breast cancer survival. 

In this DRG, students will engage in 5-6 co-design sessions to develop a medium to high fidelity prototype of a breast cancer screening outreach tool with Black women between 40 to 74 years old. In between these co-design sessions, students will prepare mockups, wireframes, and prototypes. This DRG will be done in collaboration with the Cierra Sisters, a breast cancer survivor and support organization, and UW Medicine.

We are looking for 3-4 students experienced in UI/UX design, familiarity with Figma prototyping is a plus. Students from all levels are invited to apply and participate in this project! DRG students will attend a 1 hour-long meeting weekly (date and time TBD) with additional work outside of scheduled meetings for 3 hours per credit. This will be a 2 credit DRG (e.g., 2 hours of meetings/co-design sessions + 4 hours of outside work = 2 CR).

This DRG will be run by HCDE PhD student Raina Langevin with guidance from Professor Gary Hsieh, Bridgette Hempstead, and Dr. Leah Marcotte.

Spring 2023

Evaluating Live Stream Chatbot

Co-directed with HCDE PhD student Keri Mallari

Live Streaming platforms, such as Twitch, boasts millions of streamers and viewers across multiple categories, including games, education, and creative content. While these platforms have simplified the process of going live through their apps, these streamers do not always have all the necessary tools that they would need to succeed. Our prior work has shown that live streamers value feedback, and while they do receive analytics through Twitch and other platforms, there are often challenges with the receipt, storage, and recall of qualitative feedback. In our work, we seek to address this gap by facilitating qualitative feedback seeking between livestreamers and their viewers. 

In this DRG, we will explore the use of chatbots to facilitate this data collection. Can this chatbot increase participation and solicit constructive responses? What are the tradeoffs between this approach, and the streamer soliciting these responses themselves? 

This will be a 2-4 credit DRG. We will meet for 2-6 hours in-person or virtually each week, and students will be expected to spend about 4-8 hours working outside of that time per week. Time and location will be determined based on students’ available times. 

Winter 2021

Human-Centered Design to Eliminate Disparities in Breast Cancer Screening

Led by HCDE PhD student Raina Langevin, with advising support from Gary Hsieh

In this DRG, we will work with an interdisciplinary team of community leaders and medical practitioners to address racial health disparities in breast cancer screening. Building on prior interviews, the focus of the DRG will be to develop a web-based tool to improve breast cancer screening rates and facilitate outreach by health navigators to Black/African American women. We will engage in qualitative analysis and design activities to explore and address challenges faced by Black/African American women related to breast cancer screening.

The planned activities for the quarter include the following:

Interview coding and analysis
Prototype design and development informed by interviews with community members. Usability testing of the prototype (if time allows)

We are looking for two to three students with interests in health equity, UI/UX design, and experience in 1) qualitative coding/analysis and/or 2) front-end web development.

Participants in this research group will enroll (CR/NC) through HCDE 596/HCDE 496. This group will meet remotely on Zoom for 2 hours each week at a time based on participant availability. It is anticipated that 4-5 hours will be spent on the DRG activities outside of meeting times.

Autumn 2020

Exposing trails of misinformation: How did this content reach me?

We are looking for a few students to join our Fall 2020 quarter Directed Research Group—an extension of the Summer 2020 DRG—to investigate solutions for improving the quality of online engagements. In particular, we will explore whether providing contextual details about the content you see (e.g. information about the other accounts that have shared it) affects your decision to re-post information. Our study looks specifically at information sharing on Twitter.  We will ask the following questions:

• What informational cues about a piece of online account are important to a user’s decision to share content?
• How can we design new contextual cues about other accounts to better inform a user about who those accounts are and what they are sharing?
• How do these new contextual cues impact the perceived trustworthiness of the information and the other accounts that have shared it?
• Can providing these cues for online accounts that previously shared a piece of information alter users’ decisions about whether and how to reshare it?

As a part of the research process, we will be designing/refining interventions with informational cues that we find are important to information sharing on Twitter (mostly done in first DRG on this topic). We will then study the effectiveness of these interventions — using both qualitative and quantitative methods — and refine the interventions accordingly. The findings will inform the design of social media platforms that make it easy for users to discern which information is worth sharing, and which is not.

What makes you a suitable candidate? 

• Experience with user research and facilitating user studies
• Experience with analyzing data
• Users of Twitter platform (highly preferred!)
• Looking to register for 2-3 credits (i.e. 4-6 hours of weekly work)

The group will be facilitated by PhD candidate Himanshu Zade with guidance from Prof. Kate Starbird and Prof. Gary Hsieh. Meeting time is TBD. Interested candidates should contact Himanshu Zade via email (himanz at uw dot edu).

Spring 2020

Analyzing and Supporting Twitter-Based Science Communication

Co-Directed by:

Spencer Williams, HCDE PhD student
Keri Mallari, HCDE PhD student
Gary Hsieh, HCDE faculty
Katharina Reinecke, CSE faculty

Twitter has become an important platform for researchers to communicate about their work to the public. Much of the research done in HCI has direct applications for different groups of people, and many researchers use platforms like Twitter to disseminate their results to the people who might find it useful. However, as people’s audiences on Twitter grow larger, it becomes difficult to know who your tweets are reaching. If you tweet out a blog post with helpful knowledge for kindergarten teachers, how do you know it’s actually being seen by kindergarten teachers and not bounced around by other academics?

In this project, we will be designing a system that identifies what types of people have likely read an individual tweet (e.g., using techniques from NLP and beyond), and aggregates that information to help us summarize the current state of science communication in HCI. We hope to deploy this system on a public website, to provide researchers in our field with insights about who their tweets are reaching, and why.

Activities: In this DRG, the primary tasks will include identifying relevant HCI researchers on Twitter, using text classification to categorize Twitter users, and designing and prototyping the system and underlying algorithms. We will also be reading relevant papers about science communication on social media, NLP, and network science.

Logistics and Expectations: This will be a 2-credit DRG. We will meet for 2 hours in person each week and students will be expected to spend about 3-4 hours working outside of that time per week. Time and location will be determined based on students’ available times.

Qualifications: We are looking for students (BA, MS, PhD, or certificate) who are familiar with web development (CSE 154, HCDE 537), design (HCDE 318/418/518), and/or information visualization (HCDE 411/511, CSE 412/442/512, CS&SS 569). 

Summer 2019

Implementing Mental Health Strategies in Everyday Life

Many people cope with mental health challenges. People develop strategies to cope with stressful situations and to improve outcomes for supporting mental health. In this DRG we seek to understand how people implement strategies to support mental health in their everyday life. Through a qualitative study we will understand how people work with health providers to decide on goals to support mental health, how individuals implement solutions towards mental health goals, and how people update their goals and strategies as they try to implement them every day. We will be working in the context of depression and older adults, focusing on people who are working with a therapist towards their goals.

Requirements: It is strongly recommended that students took HCDE 313/418/518. If you have not taken any of these courses please provide a strong explanation of your interest in participating in the DRG, and any other relevant experience that would inform your participation in the DRG.

DRG Activities: During the DRG we will conduct an interview and diary study to understand how people implement mental health strategies in their everyday life. We will also analyze interactions between clients and therapists to understand their practices in setting goals and planning actions during the therapy session.

We will finalize protocols to interview clients and therapists, analyze therapy sessions between clients and therapists, conduct interviews with therapists and clients, and analyze qualitative data.

Students will be expected to participate in some or all of: recruiting participants, conducting interviews, analyzing qualitative data, and writing up results.

We will meet for 90 minutes weekly. The time and day of the DRG will be decided to accommodate the schedule of accepted students and research team.

Credits: We expect students to register for at least 2 credits, and we highly encourage students to register for 3-4 credits HCDE 496/596; for each credit you should expect to spend about three hours of work per week. If you are seeking research experience but cannot sign up for credits, please explain in your application.

Students will get exposure to a variety of facets of the research process, and can expect to work closely PhD Student Elena Agapie, with guidance from Prof. Gary Hsieh and Sean Munson. Please contact Elena Agapie (eagapie@uw.edu) if you have questions.

Summer 2019

To reply or to quote?: Conversational frames on Twitter

How we interact with simple design features on online platforms can lead to larger consequences. For example, downstream threads that emerge from replied tweets vs quoted tweets can support different kinds of conversational frames. For investigating this further, we are organizing a Directed Research Group (DRG) 'To reply or to quote?: Conversational frames on Twitter' this summer 2019. There is also a possibility to get involved in a research publication at the end of the DRG.

We are looking for students who:

Are curious about human conversations on social media
Have some experience or want to learn qualitative research methods
Are keen to learn about experimental designs
Want to register for 3-4 summer credits (i.e. 9-12 hours of weekly work)

The group will be facilitated by PhD student Himanshu Zade and advised by Prof. Kate Starbird and Prof. Gary Hsieh. If you are excited to participate, please send a cover letter (explaining your interest) and resume to Himanshu (himanz@uw.edu). 

Implementing Mental Health Strategies in Everyday Life

Spring 2019

In this DRG we seek to understand how people develop and use strategies to manage their mental health in their everyday life. We will conduct a qualitative study to understand how people work individually, and with their therapists, to develop strategies that help people with their everyday life to cope with mental health issues.

As part of the DRG we will finalize interview protocols (that we already have a draft of), analyze therapy sessions between clients and therapists, conduct interviews with therapists and clients, and analyze qualitative data.

Many people cope with mental health challenges. People develop strategies to cope with stressful situations and to improve outcomes for supporting mental health. In this DRG we seek to understand how people implement strategies to support mental health in their everyday life. Through a qualitative study we will understand how people work with health providers to decide on goals to support mental health, how individuals implement solutions towards mental health goals, and how people update their goals and strategies as they try to implement them everyday. We will be working in the context of depression and older adults.

Requirements: Students are expected to have taken HCDE 313/418/518.

Activities: During the DRG we will conduct an interview and diary study to understand how people implement mental health strategies in their everyday life. We will also analyze interactions between clients and therapists to understand their practices in setting goals and planning actions during the therapy session.

Students will be expected to participate in recruiting participants, conducting interviews, analyzing qualitative data, and writing up results.

We will meet for 90 minutes weekly. The time and day of the DRG will be decided to accommodate the schedule of accepted students and research team. You can register for 1–3 credit hours in HCDE 496/596; for each credit you should expect to spend about three hours of work per week outside of meeting times.

Design and Development for Crowdsourcing Physical Activity Advice

Spring 2018

In this DRG, we are looking for a few designers and developers to work on the design of CrowdFit. CrowdFit is a tool that leverages the potential of people who are remote from each other to provide help for physical activity. CrowdFit enables an online helper, such as a worker from a task marketplace like Mechanical Turk, to create an actionable plan that follows expert techniques and fits the needs of the person they are helping.  CrowdFit has a client interface for the person who receives the physical activity plan and a helper interface for the people who provide the help and support.

The students will work as a team on the website redesign. Students can choose to participate in one of the two roles below, or to work on both aspects.

(1) Design roles: As part of the website redesign, students will perform usability testing, design the brand for this application, create wireframes and assets for the visual and interaction design of the website. Students should have taken HCDE 308 or HCDE 508

(2) Developer roles: Students will develop new features into an existing tool. Students should have taken HCDE 310 or equivalent. Experience is desirable with back end: Python, or Django, and front-end: Javascript, JQuery.

To apply, submit a statement stating why you are interested in participating in this DRG, and your resume. Include a link to your portfolio if you are applying for a design position. Include a link to your github or share example of your development if you are applying for a developer position.  

Conversational Agent for Collecting Patient Information in Hospital Waiting Rooms

Spring 2018

More data from patients are needed to understand low-income patients’ needs and offer tailored services to address these needs. For example, discovering that a patient lacks transportation and thus cannot get to the pharmacy to fill their prescription is an important need that should be addressed. Otherwise, the doctor’s visit and prescription from that visit is wasted. Currently, this type of information is often gathered with paper and pen surveys as patients wait in waiting rooms. However, response rates are low. In this DRG, we will explore the use of conversational agents to facilitate this data collection. Can such an agent increase survey participation and improve the quality of responses? What are the tradeoffs between voice- and text-based interactions in this context?

In this project, we will be working on prototyping the user interaction, visual interface and the conversation dialogs. While we are generally looking for motivated students who are interested in exploring conversational agent designs, students with strong prototyping, design, and technical communication backgrounds are a plus, as we will be preparing for a deployable prototype. 

Supporting Designers of Behavior Change Technologies

Designers use a variety of software (Adobe Suite, prototyping tools, whiteboards, etc); information resources (forums, search-engines, blogs, peer discussions) and patterns (icon sets, templates, libraries) to assist their projects.

We have been studying how designers create systems to encourage behavior change. As part of this process, we plan to create and evaluate new tools to support their work. To continue our efforts, we are looking for about eight highly motivated students, with a variety of experience, interested in 2-5 credit hours. Weekly meeting days and times are TBD and will be scheduled to accommodate as many interested students as possible.

You will work with the research team to ideate, design, and construct low-fidelity prototypes to evaluate in design workshops. Depending on the results, we will design and develop final designs of the solutions, whatever they may be — software plug-ins, web sites or apps, or design resources (templates, design patterns). During the quarter, we will ideate, sketch, and dive into hands-on design exercises and critiques.

1. Search and review existing theoretical research on civic participation
2. Explore and discuss successful real-world strategies to encourage civic participation
3. Test and compare strategies in controlled and/or real-world settings
4. Generate a taxonomy of motivators that helps outline the strengths and weaknesses of each individual strategies