Last updated on March 2025

Career

With an educational background in human-centered design, psychology, and computer engineering, I have been doing user research since 2015. Some of my projects were focused on improving an interface or product based on users' characteristics and expectations, while others were just to learn more about users for a variety of reasons (e.g., exploring market opportunities, public opinion, etc.). The common denominator of all of my career involvement is learning about human user. Here I am describing some examples of the projects I worked on.

I have been doing many freelance projects, particularly more recently. For example, I did user research on medical digital systems and devices on users with clinical and non-clinical background. Other examples include usability testing on a gym equipment, developing a survey for the users of a website, and conducting heuristic evaluations on an app for mobile devices.

2023 – 2024: As a Senior UX/Human Factors Researcher in a contract with the Department of Veterans Affairs, I led usability investigations on VA's digital systems. In particular, VA was planning to modernize its electronic health record (EHR) system from the old CPRS to a new system (Oracle Health Millennium, formerly known as Cerner) across all of its 171 health centers nationwide. My job was to understand the user experience of the new system running on five of the pilot sites. The users included physicians, nurses, pharmacists, psychologists, and other healthcare professionals. The results I produced helped to improve usability of the interface and minimize users' errors and their risks.

2022 – 2023: As a part of the design consultancy of Product Ventures Ltd. , I led consumer insights research, informing the clients of the user acceptance of their new designs and their consumers' preferences and choice. Clients were well-known companies that produced various types of products, including kitchen appliances, gym equipment, and food packaging. I was trained and certified as a master moderator from the Burke Institute to moderate in-depth-interviews and focus groups with consumers. You probably see some of the products that I worked on in a grocery store or in your kitchen.

2018 – 2022: During this time, I was a PhD student in human-centered design at Penn State. As part of my PhD research I conducted user research and collaborated with companies on various user research projects.

For example, I investigated the use of video in online job descriptions [11, link]. The question was whether embedding a short video of a job and a day of life of an employee could influence job-seekers' attitude toward that job and organization, and whether it could have any effect on job-seekers' decision to pursue employment in that job and organization. The results from this research can inform hiring managers of whether and how to use videos in online job descriptions.

As another example of my research during PhD, in a collaborative project between Aira Tech Corp. and Penn State University, I worked in a project to improve the visual interfaces of agents who provided remote voice guidance to people with visual impairments. I conducted interviews with the agents to understand their usability issues and tested solutions to improve their performance.

In another collaborative project, this time with Charles River Analytics Inc. I investigated the effect of the realism of training materials (or simulation fidelity) on the effectiveness of training (or transfer). I conducted a series of studies to determine the relationship between fidelity and transfer [7 - 10; link, link]. Then, I proposed a method that used the videorecording of experts' performance in designing training simulators [9, link]. Although the focus of these projects was the training of troubleshooting electro-mechanical systems, other domains such as medical education, aviation, and transportation were also included.

2015 – 2018: I conducted an independent research on how humans learn causal relationships in working with devices. This was the start of my interest in user research. During this time, I was also a graduate student in the Psychology Department of Lehigh University during which I learned conducting human-subject research and conducting statistical tests on behavioral data.

pre – 2015: I was interested in computers when I was a teenager. So, prior to 2015, I was a student in computer engineering (mostly software and AI) from high school up to a MSc. degree. The topics I learned and practiced include programming, computer graphics, databases, algorithms, operating systems, computer architecture, Web, and data structure. You can see some of my old codes in my Github page.

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Some Other Works

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Publications