Hi, I am Diva, a final-year Ph.D. candidate at Drexel University's College of Computing and Informatics. My research areas include Human-Computer Interaction, Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, and Technology for Underrepresented Populations. Specifically, I use qualitative and mixed-methods research approaches to design emerging technologies for family caregivers in the contexts of parenting and dementia caregiving.
I worked as a UX Researcher in Fall 2023 at Vanguard, where I led an end-to-end mixed-methods discovery study and an unmoderated remote usability study. In Summer 2022, I worked at Amazon as a UX Research intern to conduct a qualitative DEI evaluation using contextual inquiry. Previously, I completed my Master of Science in Human-Computer Interaction from University of Maryland, College Park, in 2019, and my Bachelor in Design from Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati, India, in 2015. I also worked as a Research Assistant for Kidsteam at University of Maryland and as a UX Designer in the industry in India.
05/10/2024: I am one of the two recipients of the Drexel CCI PhD Research Excellence Award for 2023-24! [PhD Research Excellence Award]
04/1/2024 - 06/15/2024: I will serve as an instructor for the graduate course "Human-Computer Interaction" at Drexel University. [Drexel CCI]
09/18/2023 - 03/22/2024: Completed my internship working as a PhD UX Research Intern at Vanguard! I worked in the Client Experience and Digital Team, taking on a comprehensive mixed-methods discovery study and a remote usability evaluative study. [Vanguard CXD]
03/1/2024: Our late-breaking work "Artificial Intelligence Systems for Supporting Informal Caregivers of People Living with Alzheimer’s Disease or Related Dementias: A Systematic Review" is accepted to the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ‘24). [DOI]
09/18/2023: Our full paper "Emotion Work in Caregiving: The Role of Technology to Support Informal Caregivers of Persons Living With Dementia" is accepted to the ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW ‘24) to be held in San José, Costa Rica! This paper is part of my dissertation work. [DOI]
06/15/2023: Our work-in-progress paper "Bringing Emotions into Practice: A Framework for AI Design to Support Emotion Work" is accepted to the ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW ‘23) to be held in Minneapolis, MN! [DOI]
04/13/2023: My dissertation work "Bringing Emotions into Practice: The Role of AI in Supporting Emotional Work in Informal Caregiving" is accepted to the Doctoral Consortium track at ACM Designing Interactive Systems (DIS '23) Conference in Pittsburgh, PA! [DOI]
03/08/2023: I am invited to present my work at the WISH2023 symposium as part of the ACM CHI2023 conference in Hamburg, Germany. [WISH2023]
09/26/2022: Our full paper "Design and Evaluation Challenges of Conversational Agents in Healthcare and Wellbeing" is accepted to the Journal of Medical Internet Research (JMIR). [DOI]
08/06/2022: Our full paper "Motivational Interviewing Conversational Agent for Parents as Proxies for their Children in Healthy Eating: Development and User Testing" is accepted to the Journal of Medical Internet Research Human Factors (JMIR Human Factors). [DOI] [Video]
06/13/2022 - 9/2/2022: Completed my summer internship working as a UX Research intern at Amazon in their Physical Stores team!
10/17/2021: Our full paper "Creative Arts Therapies for the Mental Health of Emerging Adults: A Systematic Review" is accepted to the Arts in Psychotherapy journal. [DOI]
09/16/2021: Excited to announce that I have been accepted to Google's CS Research Mentorship program [Google CSRMP]!
6/14/2021: Our poster "Toward Privacy Implications in Developing and Deploying Chatbots in Informatics Research: Analysis of Chatbot Development Platforms" has been accepted to AMIA.
[f5] Diva Smriti, Lu Wang, Jina Huh-Yoo. (2024). Emotion Work in Caregiving: The Role of Technology to Support Informal Caregivers of Persons Living With Dementia. ACM Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW ‘24). [DOI]
[f4] Ahmet Baki Kocaballi, Emre Sezgin, Leigh Clark, John M. Carroll, Yungui Huang, Jina Huh-Yoo, Junhan Kim, Rafal Kocielnik, Yi-Chieh Lee, Lena Mamykina, Elliot G. Mitchell, Robert J. Moore, Prasanth Murali, Elizabeth D. Mynatt, Sun Young Park, Alessandro Pasta, Deborah Richards, Lucas M. Silva, Diva Smriti, Brendan Spillane, Zhan Zhang, Tamara Zubatiy. (2022). Design and Evaluation Challenges of Conversational Agents in Healthcare and Wellbeing. Journal of Medical Internet Research (JMIR). [DOI]
[f3] Diva Smriti, Tsui-Sui Kao, Rahil Rathod, Ji Youn Shin, Wei Peng, Jake Williams, Munif Mujib, Meghan Colosimo, Jina Huh-Yoo. (2022). Motivational Interviewing Conversational Agent for Parents as Proxies for their Children in Healthy Eating: Development and User Testing. Journal of Medical Internet Research Human Factors (JMIR Human Factors). [DOI][Video]
[f2] Diva Smriti, Siddhant Ambulkar, Qiongyu Meng, Girija Kaimal, Kevin Ramotar, Sun Young Park, Jina Huh-Yoo. (2021). Creative Arts Therapies for the Mental Health of Emerging Adults: A Systematic Review. The Arts in Psychotherapy. [DOI]
[f1] Karla Badillo-Urquiola, Diva Smriti, Brenna McNally, Elizabeth Bonsignore, Evan Golub, Pamela Wisniewski. (2019). Stranger Danger!: Social Media App Features Co-Designed with Children to Keep Them Safe Online. ACM Interaction Design and Children (IDC ‘19). [DOI]
Posters (Peer Reviewed)
[p6] Lu wang, Diva Smriti, Hao Yuan, Jina Huh-Yoo. (2024). Artificial Intelligence Systems for Supporting Informal Caregivers of People Living with Alzheimer’s Disease or Related Dementias: A Systematic Review. Extended Abstracts of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA ’24). [DOI]
[p5] Diva Smriti and Jina Huh-Yoo. (2023). Bringing Emotions into Practice: A Framework for AI Design to Support Emotion Work. ACM Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW ‘23). [DOI]
[p4] Diva Smriti, Rahil Rathod, Jina Huh-Yoo. (2021). Toward Privacy Implications in Developing and Deploying Chatbots in Informatics Research: Analysis of Chatbot Development Platforms. The Annual Symposium of American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA ‘21).
[p3] Tsui-Sui Annie Kao, Jiying Ling, Diva Smriti, Ji Youn Shin, Wei Peng, Jina Huh-Yoo. (2021). The Feasibility of Technology-Adapted Motivational Interviewing (TAMI). Midwest Nursing Research Society (MNRS) Virtual Annual Research Conference ‘21.
[p2] Diva Smriti, Ji Youn Shin, Munif Mujib, Meghan Colosimo, Tsui-Sui Annie Kao, Jake Williams, Jina Huh-Yoo. (2020). TAMICA: Tailorable Autonomous Motivational Interviewing Conversational Agent. EAI International Conference on Pervasive Computing Technologies for Healthcare (PervasiveHealth ‘20). [DOI]
[p1] Karla Badillo-Urquiola, Diva Smriti, Brenna McNally, Elizabeth Bonsignore, Evan Golub, Pamela Wisniewski. (2018). Co-Designing with Children to Address “Stranger Danger” on Musical.ly. Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security (SOUPS ’18).[BEST POSTER AWARD]
Workshop Papers and Abstracts (Juried)
[w5] Diva Smriti, Tsui-Sui Kao, Rahil Rathod, Ji Youn Shin, Wei Peng, Jake Williams, Munif Mujib, Meghan Colosimo, Jina Huh-Yoo. (2023). Motivational Interviewing Conversational Agent for Parents as Proxies for their Children in Healthy Eating: Development and User Testing.
Workgroup on Interactive Systems in Healthcare (WISH). ACM Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ‘23). [Poster]
[w4] Diva Smriti, Rahil Rathod, Jina Huh-Yoo. (2021). Toward Privacy Implications in Developing and Deploying Chatbots: Analysis of Chatbot Development Platforms.
Workshop: Let's Talk about CUIs: Putting Conversational User Interface Design Into Practice. ACM Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ‘21). [website]
[w3] Diva Smriti, Ji Youn Shin, Munif Mujib, Meghan Colosimo, Tsui-Sui Annie Kao, Jake Williams, Jina Huh-Yoo. (2020). TAMICA: Tailorable Autonomous Motivational Interviewing Conversational Agent.
Workshop: Conversational Agents for Health and Well-being. ACM Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ‘20).
[w2] Diva Smriti, Rose Ann DiMaria-Ghalili, Laura N. Gitlin, Aleksandra Sarcevic, Erjia Yan, Jina Huh-Yoo. (2020). Information Quality Assessment Framework for Online Dementia Care Resources. The Gerontological Society of America (GSA) 2020 Annual Scientific Meeting.
[w1] Angela Mastrianni, Diva Smriti. (2020). Exploring the Effect of Social Connections on Transactional Behaviors in Venmo. Americas Conference on Information Systems (AMCIS 2020) TREOs.
Doctoral Consortium
[d1] Diva Smriti. (2023). Bringing Emotions into Practice: The Role of AI in Supporting Emotional Work in Informal Caregiving ACM Designing Interactive Systems (DIS ‘23). [DOI]
Projects
Motivational Interviewing Conversational Agent Aiding in Adoption of Healthy Eating Habits in Parents of Young Children
Obesity is one of the leading causes of chronic illnesses in American children today. Parents’ feeding styles and preferences towards food plays a significant role in children's eating patterns. However, parents often face additional burdens such lack of time and motivation that hinder them from making healthy food choices for their children. Motivational Interviewing (MI) technique is a proven effective counseling method that helps individuals to discover motivations and strategies for personalized behavior change, especially for diet modification. We developed a conversational agent on Raspberry Pi using a MI conversation script with the help of an MI expert. We conducted studies with parents of young children who wanted to eat healthier together with their children. To test the perceptions and effectiveness of the developed prototype, we conducted studies including pre- and post-test questionnaires together with interviews.
Methods Used: User testing, Pre- and Post-test Questionnnaires, Semi-structured interviews, Descriptive and Inferential Statistics, Thematic Analysis
Related Publications: JMIR Human Factors, PervasiveHealth '20, CHI '20 workshop
Video:
Privacy Control in Conversational Agent Development
The CHI community increasingly develops and evaluates conversational agents for various areas such as health, business, or education. Conversational agents have become widely integrated with third-party applications. This integration allows these third-party platforms to collect end-users’ personal information so that conversational agents can provide personalized marketing and experiences to the end-users. It is unclear, however, which third-party applications are integrated with various conversational agent development platforms and how explicit their involvement is to the end-users. We address this knowledge gap by first examining conversational agent development platforms and the information given at the set-up process regarding various parties’ access to end-users’ information.
Methods Used: Chatbot platform selection, Simulation of chatbot development process, Thematic Analysis
Tags:
User Research, Participatory Design, Privacy for Children
Demographics of the Children:
8 - 13 years, Equal Male : Female ratio
As part of Kidsteam, I worked as a second author on a project focused on exploring the privacy and security issues for children on social media platforms, with our focus being on musical.ly (now TikTok). We published a poster in the Fourteenth Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security (SOUPS) 2018, and won the Best Poster Award!
After the first session of co-designing with the children which resulted in the above poster, we followed up with a second session which involved using the technique of Layered Elaboration on screens that we prepared as a result of the first session. Each transparent layer reresents one session with one group of children. The following screens are a result (all transparent layers combined) of the follow-up session:
We are in the process of qualitatively analysing the above data captured and along with the audio files that we recorded during the session.
Demographics of the Children:
8 - 13 years, Equal Male : Female ratio
Using the Cooperative Inquiry method of Participatory Design methodology, children are treated as design partners equal to adults to come up with design solutions for the proposed problem. As a Kidsteam Researcher in the Human Computer Interaction Lab at University of Maryland, College Park, my task is to facilitate equal participation among children and adults as designers, while at the same time retaining the child-like perspective to the design solutions offered by the children.
"Bond" Application
Video : Defines the Problem and the proposed Solution
Tags:
User Experience, UX Design, User Research, Prototyping
DIGITAL COMMUNICATION FOR LONG DISTANCE RELATIONSHIPS (FRIENDS, FAMILY OR ROMANTIC) IS NOT IMMERSIVE.
What our target audience meant by NOT IMMSERSIVE?
- Lack of context while communicating through technology
- Nuances of conversation (non-verbal cues) get missed out
- Too much effort required to keep the conversation going
- Fear of missing out on events occuring in other person's life
Our Solution :
The "BOND" application which captures the Mood, Time, Weather, Battery Level, Messages, Pictures and Videos of the users effortlessly in a chronological order, to be displayed on the loved one's phone, or an Ambient Display.
Affinity Mapping :
We listed down all the problems we were interested in, and which were significant according to our research. We then grouped similar problems together to arrive at our problem statement.
Image : Affinity Mapping of Problem Areas
Personas :
We defined our personas based on our problem area and the specific problems that we intended to solve after the affinity mapping sessions.
Zac Lombardo
Jane/James Ember
Helen Wilson
Interviews :
Based on the personas, we recruited 20 people to conduct semi-structured interviews with them to arrive at specific pain points in the problem domain.
Image : Interview Quotes
Feature Selection :
Based on interviews, we performed affinity mapping on the pain points suggested by the interviewees, and arrived at the following features for tackling the problems in our prototypes.
Image : Feature Selection
Low Fidelity Prototypes and User Flow :
User flow for the Configuration Application
Image : Low-fi Ambient display
Usability Testing :
We performed Cognitive Walkthroughs and Heuristic Evaluations on the low-fidelity mockups of Configuration app user-flow and the ambient display respectively to gather feedback on and validation of our designs.
Image : Performing Cognitive Walkthroughs and Heuristic Evaluation
Results :
After performing Cognitive Walkthroughs and Heuristic Evaluations on the low-fidelity mockups of Configuration app user-flow and the ambient display respectively, the following broad results were observed. The users liked some of the features, as well did not like some. Some of the features could be improved upon.
Image : Results of Usability testing
High Fidelity Prototypes and User Flow :
After taking into consideration the results from the usability testing, we removed and worked upon some features, and created our hifh-fidelity prototypes. The link to the invision prototype is given below.
The high-fidelity ambient display viewable to your partner anywhere in the world:
High fidelity Ambient Display
Takeaways :
My role in this project was in the Research and Ideation phase, especially with the problem statement formation, wireframing, prototyping and video prototyping. Features from various different sketches got incoporated into the final designs. From working with a diverse team, I got to understand more about people from different cultures. The deadlines helped us to pre-plan and complete our tasks well within time.
Although time constraints helped us to complete our tasks effieciently, it also limited us in the sense that we had to do our best with the resources available within that time frame. Hence, we were limited in our ability to thoroughly test our final designs with the intended users.
In the future, I would like to conduct more interviews and get more feedback on the final designs of our project, which would help us come with better, more relatable solutions, if not justify our designs.
Boarding Pass Re-design
Using the Gestalt Priciples, an old, cluttered boarding pass had to be redesigned to make more sense of the information.
Tags:
Information Architecture, Visual Design, Gestalt Principles
Course:
Fundamentals of HCI, UMD College Park
Date:
Feb 2018
Tools:
Adobe Illustrator, Sketch, Pen & Paper
Image : Old, boring, cluttered boarding pass
Image : New, redesigned by me
Using the Gestalt Principles, information is categorised as:
Vertically : The details needed to find your flight and seat are in the leftmost, the details required to get into the flight are at the center, and the details required for later part of the flight are at the rightmost.
Horizontally : First row includes details required when arriving at an airport, and the Second row gives details for entering the flight and landing.
The important and similar information are grouped togther in the Blue box, keeping in mind the Law of Similarity.
A visual aid showing the postion of the seat in the flight is also provided, since attention span of users is less, and a lot of confusion is generated while finding seats.
A QR code is also added so as to make it easy for users to check flight statuses while in the airport, and reduce the load on the users' memory.
Project Title
Use this area of the page to describe your project. The icon above is part of a free icon set by
Flat Icons. On their website, you can download their free set with 16 icons, or you can purchase the entire set with 146 icons for only $12!
Use this area of the page to describe your project. The icon above is part of a free icon set by
Flat Icons. On their website, you can download their free set with 16 icons, or you can purchase the entire set with 146 icons for only $12!
Use this area of the page to describe your project. The icon above is part of a free icon set by
Flat Icons. On their website, you can download their free set with 16 icons, or you can purchase the entire set with 146 icons for only $12!
Hi, I am Diva, a final-year Ph.D. candidate at Drexel University's College of Computing and Informatics. My research areas include Human-Computer Interaction, Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, and Technology for Underrepresented Populations. Specifically, I use qualitative and mixed-methods research approaches to design emerging technologies for family caregivers in the contexts of parenting and dementia caregiving.
