Ongoing research areas

Human-Centered Design for Mental Health Interventions

Evidence-based psychosocial interventions are typically designed to perform well in controlled research settings. These same interventions often fail to be adopted or used effectively in practice — making them unavailable in the community settings where most people actually seek mental health care. At the UW ALACRITY Center, we apply human-centered design and implementation science to adapt interventions for different user groups, contexts, and delivery formats, with the goal of increasing their usability, engagement, adoption, and ultimately their real-world efficacy.

A core contribution of this research is a set of methods and frameworks that help designers and implementation scientists collaborate. This work spans non-digital and digital interventions; while human-centered design principles apply across both, the considerations for each differ in important ways.

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Personal Informatics and Goal-Directed Self-Tracking

Self-tracking devices and applications have become widespread, but our ability to collect data has vastly outpaced people's ability to act on it. A thread running through more than a decade of my research is that tracking tools work best when they are organized around the tracker's goals — not around what sensors can capture. This work has examined how people adopt, use, lapse, and abandon self-tracking tools; developed the Lived Informatics Model to characterize these practices; studied goal-directed tracking across chronic conditions including migraine and IBS; explored how personal informatics practices interact with social contexts, workplace wellness programs, and generative AI; and contributed design principles and methods for building tracking tools that serve people rather than accumulate data. This project was supported primarily by the National Science Foundation under award NSF IIS #1553167 and the National Library of Medicine.

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Integrating Patient-Generated Health Data in Clinical Care

People increasingly generate rich streams of health data — food diaries, symptom logs, blood pressure readings, activity records — outside of clinical visits. How that data flows between patients and their care teams, and what it takes to make that flow useful rather than burdensome, is far from settled. In a series of projects funded by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI), the National Library of Medicine, and others, my collaborators and I have studied how patients and clinicians collaborate around patient-generated health data, designed tools to support that collaboration, and examined how data practices reshape the patient-provider relationship. This work spans conditions including irritable bowel syndrome, migraine, hepatic encephalopathy, hypertension, and healthy eating.

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Advancing Critical Flicker Fusion as a Biomarker for At-Home Health Monitoring

Critical flicker fusion frequency (CFF) — the threshold at which a flickering light appears steady — is a neurophysiological measure that reflects cognitive function without the confounds of many psychometric tests. My collaborators and I have developed Beacon, a portable, smartphone-paired device that makes CFF self-administrable outside clinical settings, with particular application to screening for hepatic encephalopathy in patients with chronic liver disease and cirrhosis.

Our work spans device design, clinical validation, and real-world deployment. We have shown that patients can reliably self-administer CFF measurements at home, with strong agreement with established clinical instruments, and that measurements remain stable across varied home environments and times of day. This line of work contributes to broader efforts to move validated clinical biomarkers into patients' homes, and surfaces design considerations relevant to researchers building longitudinal health monitoring tools.

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Power, Equity, and Agency in Technology Design

Technologies that mediate information access, self-representation, and social participation carry real consequences for people and for the groups they belong to. Across several projects, my collaborators and I have examined when and how technology design shapes power, reinforces inequities, or undermines individual agency—and what responsible design can do about it.

This work spans image search algorithms that systematically underrepresent women in professional roles; smart home cameras whose surveillance capabilities spill well beyond their intended uses; wearable tracking deployed on collegiate athletes in ways that benefit institutions more than individuals; platform design features that erode users' sense of agency over their own time and attention; and a framework articulating four persistent tensions that arise when HCI researchers work with marginalized communities.

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Past projects

Social Software for Wellness

My early work on personal informatics and health interventions examined how social features in digital health tools can help people access emotional, instrumental, and informational support; strengthen accountability; and create shared experiences. But early commercial implementations often invited sharing in ways that violated social norms, producing disappointing and awkward interactions. By building and evaluating a series of research prototypes — Three Good Things, GoalPost, GoalLine, Commit to Steps, Crumbs, and Yarn — my research identified design patterns that support the benefits of social features while avoiding the pitfalls. Post-doctoral scholar Laura Pina also led an examination of tracking, sharing, and coordination among families, including the design and deployment of DreamCatcher.

This research was funded by Intel, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the University of Michigan Rackham Graduate School, and the University of Washington Royalty Research Fund.

Highlighted publications:

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Translating HCI Research into Practice

A recurring challenge in applied fields like HCI is that research findings rarely reach the practitioners and communities who could use them. My collaborators and I have studied this translation problem and developed resources to address it — examining why practitioners don't use academic research, what kinds of resources help bridge that gap, and how to build them. This includes developing design cards to help health-focused designers apply personal informatics research, and a translational science model that characterizes the full pipeline from basic research to real-world impact.

I am continuing this thread in my work applying human-centered design to mental health services, but the questions here concern HCI research-to-practice translation broadly.

Representing Uncertainty in Everyday Decisions

Everyday decisions — catching a bus, reading a forecast, evaluating a health risk — often depend on uncertain information, but most interfaces strip that uncertainty away and present predictions as point estimates. In collaboration with Matthew Kay, Jessica Hullman, and others, I studied how to represent uncertainty in ways that help non-expert users make better-calibrated decisions. We examined how people reason about probabilistic arrival predictions in a real transit app, then developed and evaluated quantile dotplots and CDF displays as alternatives to standard representations — showing improvements in decision-making compared to conventional displays.

BALANCE: Enhancing Diversity in News and Opinion Aggregators

Aggregators such as Digg, Reddit, and Google News rely on ratings and links to select and present subsets of the large quantity of news and opinion items generated each day. The goals of this research were to: 1) form alternative measures of diversity for result sets; 2) develop algorithms for selecting result sets that jointly optimize for diversity and popularity; 3) assess the impacts of alternative selection and presentation methods on people's willingness to use an aggregation service, their exposure to diverse opinions, and the size of their argument repertoires. The result provided a better understanding of alternative notions of what it means for a set of items to be diverse, and the range of reactions that different people have to varying levels and presentations of diversity. This project was funded by NSF grant #IIS-0916099.

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Online Political Discussions in Non-Political Spaces

Political theorists have articulated normative ideals for political deliberation. Theorists argue that democracy flourishes in societies where political discussion is frequent and frequently approaches these deliberative ideals: such societies will make better collective choice on important matters at all levels of government, and those choices will have greater public legitimacy.

I hypothesize that, although political discussion is less frequent in spaces where people have connected for non-political reasons, when it does occur the political discussion may be closer to deliberative ideals. People who have come together for a non-political reason may have diverse political views, and because they have existing relationships to protect, they may more open to other viewpoints and more willing to do the hard work of formulating their own opinions in ways that they think will appeal to others who do not fully share their own political outlook.

The Prevalence of Political Discourse in Non-Political Blogs. SA Munson, P Resnick. ICWSM 2011.

SI Display

Working with Paul Resnick and Emily Rosengren, I built a public display system for the School of Information. Community members could address posts to the display using their Twitter accounts. The display ran for several years at the School of Information, and SI Master's student Morgan Keys released an open source version of the software.

Thanks and Tweets: Comparing Two Public Displays. SA Munson, E Rosengren, P Resnick. CSCW 2011.

Wikis as a next generation FAQ

This work examines the interrelationship of collaborative authoring software (Wikis) and discussion software (forums, mailing lists, etc) in support communities. Wikis allow for knowledge generated by community members to be aggregated and accessed more efficiently than newsgroup or mailing list archives. Initial work included collection of best practices from one community that uses both wiki and email list channels. Furnishing medical support communities with Wikis allows us observe how these communities adopt, populate, and maintain these tools.

In a third setting, I examined use of a workgroup wiki in the enterprise. Workgroups can struggle with remembering past projects and sharing this information with other groups in the organization. In a case study of the deployment of MediaWiki as a publishing tool for building organizational memory, group members' motivation to document past projects increased. A browsable collection of past projects allowed for discovery of past work, building the reputation of individuals and the workgroup, and development of transactive memory within the workgroup. The “anyone can edit” feature, frequently touted as the main benefit of wikis, had both benefits and drawbacks in this implementation.

Maytag: A multi-staged approach to identifying complex events in textual data

We present a novel application of NLP and text mining to the analysis of financial documents. In particular, we describe an implemented prototype, Maytag, which combines information extraction and subject classification tools in an interactive exploratory framework. We present experimental results on their performance, as tailored to the financial domain, and some forward-looking extensions to the approach that enables users to specify classifications on the fly.

Maytag: A multi-staged approach to identifying complex events in textual data. C Chang, L Ferro, J Gibson, J Hitzeman, S Lubar, J Palmer, SA Munson, M Vilain, B Wellner. Conference of the European Chapter for Computational Linguistics 2006.

Undergrad & masters projects

2006-20072005-20062004-20052003-20042002-20032001-2002