<aside> 🙋 Here’s how Vera introduce herself on her website:

I'm only 5'2'' tall, but I'm able to reach new heights with my commitment to empathy and enthusiasm for human-centered design.

Vera is currently pursuing a Master of Human-Computer Interaction at CMU.

</aside>

💡Why MHCI?

My Bachelor's degrees are in computer science and psychology, minored in graphic design. I was personally pretty passionate about those three domains. But for Computer Science part, a lot of my classmates were going the route of software engineering. Unfortunately, my brain was not very keen on debugging 24/7 during my job. That type of rigidity deterred me from further pursuing software development. As for Psychology, I wasn't so interested in clinical psychology, because it does take a long time to pursue a PhD degree.

Going through my undergrad experience, I usually didn't have the opportunity to work with psychology and computer science students at the same time. They were all very separate like paths. And very rarely did they cross or like form. Rarely in the class did I have have the opportunity to work with students from different backgrounds.

So with that in mind, I was pretty determined that I want to continue my education. At the time, I didn't feel like I had good enough grasp of what HCI really is, what UX is, and it was a direction I was really hoping to gain more traction and because I think it's a perfect intersection between what I'm interested in: the tech side of things, and psychology as an understanding the rationale for people's behaviors and attitudes. And also, I do enjoy designing, specifically digital design. I guess I wasn't going to rely on that as my safety net, but I feel like HCI is perfect, because it kind of has those three, all interlaced together.

💡Interesting Classes you’ve taken in MHCI?

The prescribed MHCI courses, like PUI and UCRE and IXD, that all MHCI students will take. Aside from those, I’ve also taken Persuasive Design with Geoff Kaufman.

I think Persuasive Design is a very popular course, because the instructor makes it very easy to understand the material. Geoff always brings very concrete examples to the table, and a lot of what shares is grounded in research that he has done or people at CMU have done. So it's easy that if you want to follow up on those research directions.

I really enjoyed the course partly because one of my majors in undergrad was Psychology. A lot of the underpinnings for persuasion are also resonated with theories and research in psychology. It’s about how people might subconsciously behave and their attitudes could be swayed by certain factors that are implicit rather than explicit.

Although I was a major in Psychology in undergrad, the persuasive design class still taught me quite a lot, because there's a lot of new theories that I learned.

💡What is your Project in Persuasive Design about?

In the Persuasive Design class, With your team, you will design a persuasive strategy that could take the form of like a game, or could be a mobile app. You will conduct research in that domain, and test your persuasive technique, adjust things accordingly and continue testing throughout the semester. Essentially, you're trying to achieve a Persuasive Goal.

For my team, our goal is to have young men from ages like between 18 to 30 become more comfortable with talking about or just discussing, and increasing empathy towards women's experiences in menstruation, body hair, and sexual pleasure.

Because a lot of the times when these discussions occur, men tend to maybe become uncomfortable and show that they're naturally gravitating towards the idea. It’s like these topics around women's health are stigmatic to them, and they have certain preconceptions. If these preconceptions perpetuate, that could be very dangerous to women’s mental health, as well as physical health.

That was our persuasive goal to kind of get the conversation flowing between or engaging young men in a way that shows them more more knowledge about women's health, make them more comfortable through a Card Game.

💡 Any Psychology-Related Research Experience in CMU HCII?

I'm currently in an independent study in Jessica Hammer’s OH!Lab. It's about an educational game called Bloomwood Stories that is intended to increase kids health literacy. In the game, there are five different narratives with five different characters who live within the Bloomwood Neighborhood. And then throughout each narrative, the player is tasked to complete different quests and there are a lot of digital health knowledge embedded within this these quests.

💡 Future Career Goal after MHCI?

In the near future, I see myself being a UX designer. I do have a lot of growing interests in UX research. But then again, my goal was to work in a capacity where I could leverage my knowledge in computer science, and design and psychology. For research, you maybe have less opportunities to dabble in the design part of things. I don't know if I'm ready to relinquish that part of my HCI practitioner.

The part where I've grown the most in this MHCI program is learning how to conduct all of that research, and bring that into the design sphere of things. But based on my last UX internship, it's very rare that one person gets to kind of be heavy handed in both UX design and UX research. Usually you have like a very dedicated team of researchers, and then they hand off to the designers, etc. So I think I'll probably be in a UX design role.