Designing Crowdsourced, Context-Sensitive Help for Web Applications: Users are increasingly searching for information online to learn how to use applications and recover from unexpected application behaviors. Even though forums, wikis, and help documents may contain rich information about resolving a large number of issues, these resources are usually scattered and disconnected from the context in which the user seeks help. In my research, I am exploring the design of a crowdsourced help tool that allows users to share knowledge of support issues within the context of the application (with Andrew J. Ko and Jacob O. Wobbrock).

Characterizing Modern Software Product Support: As an intern with the User Interface Research group at Autodesk Research, I investigated different facets of software product support processes through a quantitative analysis of existing support requests, a survey with product support specialists, and follow-up interviews. In particular, the focus was on the utility of different multimedia formats that modern web-based support systems enable. Our results showed that despite the value that these formats bring to support tasks, support specialists still face bottlenecks in remotely resolving software problems (with Tovi Grossman and George Fitzmaurice).

Usability Evaluation in Complex Domains: I designed and executed a field study with usability experts in large corporations and research labs in a variety of domains. Findings established the challenges of evaluation in expert domains and the coping strategies and workarounds used by practitioners. We were able to highlight number of important challenges for HCI practitioners, researchers, and educators, and opportunities for future work (with Jacob O. Wobbrock and Andrew J. Ko).

Developing user-centered clinical research tools: I applied user-centered design and evaluation techniques to support the development of querying tools for clinical translational research at the Institute for Translational Health Sciences at UW. In addition to investigating how structured queries are formulated, we looked at how to faciliate the transformation of query results into visualizations and summary data artifacts that could aid clinical investigators (with Nick Anderson and Peter Tarczy-Hornoch).

Facilitating knowledge management in public health: In 2007-8, I worked as a research assistant at the Center for Public Health Informatics and was involved in the design and evaluation of a customizable knowledge management system for public health practitioners (with Sherrilynne Fuller).

Information-seeking in bioinformatics software development: During my MS, I investigated software development activities in bioinformatics, focusing on the information-seeking activities of computer scientists versus biologists (with Carole Palmer).