Beyond the numbers

The current digital transformation shifts towards more and more business sectors moving online while people are increasingly accessing data. This accelerated shift is blurring the line that separates lifestyle and technology, so there is an opportunity to rethink how technology-based solutions impact users and communities in a meaningful way.

New trends in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and User Experience (UX) aim to know much more than merely ask the user about the effectiveness of a system. Therefore, my research aims to address how to support deeper and more meaningful experiences with technology in specific using situations and user’s behaviors.

I focus on:

Understanding as the initial stage in the development of technological systems

Acknowledging that different users have different experiences, the design of system technologies first requires an understanding of their goals, needs, values, expectations and context. Understanding is a step that strengthens the knowledge around the user in order to take both research and design choices.

Designing for user empowerment

In the design of personal interactive systems empowerment is about a shared understanding between the system and the user. My research approach considers a strong position from data-centric to user-centric design to enhance the inclusion of user empowerment in UX and HCI practices. This approach engages the user by considering people’s personal experiences and social context collected in real life, in real contexts.

Designing for personal reflective and persuasive informatics

The design of technology-mediated solutions that supports people’s daily life implies some change to existing routines and lifestyle. There are two main possible routes that refer to how much persuasive vs. reflective an application could be. If we aim at designing solutions that are harmonized with the properties of user empowerment, we need to facilitate users’ self-awareness with control over their own data, playing an active role, contributing and deciding what is important to take from the big amount of data that is collected by these systems.

Integrating qualitative and quantitative data

Now more than ever, the processes between big and small data are ubiquitous and embedded in the dynamics of the user’s daily life. When we facilitate the integration between qualitative and quantitative data (collected by the user and the system correspondingly), it is possible to provide the user with more meaningful information elements to follow a more deeper and critical reflection, therefore, creating engagement and proper understanding of their current behaviors and actions.

Designing for healthcare and wellness scenarios

Digital transformation in healthcare services is broadly changing from being solely delivered by professionals in hospitals, to considering daily-life experiences and patients’ personal contexts. A rather subtle consequence of this increasing amount of personal data is that patients are becoming more proactive in managing their health. Increasing access to personal health care data implies that people also are considered to be more responsible to monitor and reflect on their health condition.

The projects featured in this page acknowledge that different users have different experiences so that the design of digital technologies first requires a holistic understanding of stakeholders’ goals, needs, values, expectations that are conditioned to a specific context.