Yan Zhang

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Research Interests:

Usability Testing, Mental Models, Health Information-seeking, Information Organization, Human Errors, and Research Methods

Research Experience:

Research @ The University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (2005-Current)

Undergraduate students' mental models of the web as an IR system, This study is a pilot study for my dissertation. It investigated one of the fundermental questions concerning people's mental models of the Web: what elements are contained mental models. Furthermore, it explored the effects of students' mental models on their web search behaviors.
Designed the data collection methods
Conducted data collection sessions
Analyzed the data

Evidence Base for Personal Health Record (PHR) Usability, sponsored by the National Cancer Institution (NCI) to identify usability issues specific to digital personal health records.
Implemented a Web-based survey program that randomizes the order of survey items by using PHP, MySQL, and JavaScript [Check out the Demo:Test ID: phrformat; PSW: any numbers)
Coordinated survey data collection sessions
Involved in user needs assessment (interview) data analysis

Effects of Structure and Interaction Style on Distinct Search Tasks. This study compares users' search behavior and cognitive experience when using three different interfaces for the same Web-based semi-structured content to perform three kinds of search tasks. The three interfaces are relational interface, facet interface, and regular web interface.
Participated in the user study design and prepared training materials for the interfaces
Monitored data collection sessions and conducted post-session interviews
Conducting data analysis

Pedagogical Uses for Statistics in Schools of Agriculture, a part of the NSF-funded GovStat project. The purpose was to design a help system to make federal government statistical information more accessible to users in the agricultural discipline.
Conducted interviews to collect data
Analyzed the interview data using NVivo

Research @ The University of Tennessee, Knoxville (2002-2005)

Increasing Effective Student Use of the Scientific Journal Literature, sponsored by the NSF as a part of the National Science Digital Library (NSDL) project. User studies were conducted with the aim to increase effective student use of scientific journal literature.
Monitored usability testing sessions
Developed schemes for coding people's affective and cognitive reactions during the search
Designed and implemented a relational database to integrate various data for data analysis
Analyzed data by using software Observer Video-pro, QSR NUD*IST, ACCESS, and SPSS

User-Web Interaction in Finding Factual Information. This project compared the interaction behavior of two user groups, novice and experienced, as they searched for information on the Web.
Processed transaction logs and imported them into a relational database
Consolidated affective coding results into a uniformed scheme
Conducted facet analysis on queries

Course Related Research:

Knowledge structure of human errors. Using Decision Making Theories to Investigate Human Errors and Difficulties in Human-Information Retrieval System Interaction [Check out the brief proposal]
Explored definitions of human errors in the context of searching information in IR systems
Attempted to build up a new error classificaiton scheme based on decision making theories to inform usability inspection

Usability evaluation and usability study design. This is the course research project for INLS257 User Interface Design. Odum Institute's new website was evaluated and a usability study was desiged to improve the easy of use of the search interface for Odum's data repository
Evaluated the website usability using established heuristics [Check out the evaluation document]
Designed a usability test for the data repository's search interface [Check out the proposal]

Survey of Learner's Knowledge Structure. This project investigated how learners build and organize concepts in the course of learning.
Involved in designing data collection methods and instruments
Involved in designing and implementing a database model for data storage and analysis

Derris Digital Image Collection. This project constructed a prototype digital image library for Derris collection, one of the special collections in the University of Tennessee library. [Check out the example record]
Selected and scanned sample slides from Derris slides collection
Designed the metadata schema based on Dublin Core; designed the data dictionary
Constructed a database by using software FileMaker Pro for metadata storage

Last updated: 2/3/2007