I'm a PhD student at Brown University studying computing education.
I'm advised by Kathi Fisler,
and I'm a member of BrownPLT.
My current project is on socially responsible computing. I'm interested in
designing and evaluating different tools and pedagogy methods to teach
undergraduate students to think about the social impacts of the software systems
that they build and interact with.
Before coming to Brown, I did my undergrad at Swarthmore College, with a major in
computer science and minor in educational studies. I was very fortunate to work with
Professor K. Ann Renninger,
and got a taste of doing educational psychology and learning science research.
Last year, I started to become interested in usability and design. I took two courses in two different departments: Human Factors from Cognitive, Linguistic, and Psychological Sciences, and User interfaces and User experience from Computer Science. These two courses got me thinking: Why are some things hard to use? Is it just me or do other people experience the same thing? How can I better describe the usability issues? What usability design principles can be applied to improve the tools and websites? Below you can find some of my course projects that explore these questions around usability.
Persona + Storyboard
I sat down near a public printer and observed how people used it. I later interviewed a few typical users and created personas and storyboard accordingly.
Usability Test + UX
I created some tasks and questions around apartment hunting using Craigslist, conducted think-aloud initerviews, and came up with suggestions to improve Craigslist's apartment hunting functionalities.
React + UI
I explored a different way to present an online menu, by adding filtering and sorting functions.