Identity, Lifestyles & Technology

Lifestyles > Based on an analysis of U.S. and Canadian household data collected by Forrester Research, I found that while people's demographic situation (their class, gender, geographic residence) explains people's adoption of technology, their lifestyles (e.g., their beliefs and non-work activities) explains what they do with it. Please email me if you'd like to read an article (under peer review) based on my dissertation.

Digital Footprints > Digital traces of people's practices proliferate on the Internet. Privacy is the concept most often mentioned in connection to people's Internet-related existence, but other concepts, such as personal brand or ambivalence to the online accessibility of information about themselves, have been less examined. A colleague at the University of Twente and I are conducting a pilot research project exploring how people perceive their identities.

User-Centered Design Research

Design Personas > While at Sun Microsystems, Jen McGinn and I came up with a persona-creation method to pre-empt the most common complaint we heard about personas: that they are based on too little data to be trusted. We used a mixed-methods approach (short interviews with a few people representing clusters derived from quantitative surveys) to create "data-driven" personas. Our client department embraced and implemented the personas successfully in curriculum sales and development. (See our CHI paper on this method).

Designing for Workarounds in e-Government > As part of a project to design a portal for "expats," I've been conducting pre-design interviews with people coming to live and work in the Netherlands. In this context, I'm working on a paper about the tension between traditional user-centered design practices and the goals of e-Government web sites.