Yan Zhang

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Research Interests

Mental Models, Software Usability, Consumer Health Information Seeking, Human IR Errors, Information Architecture, and Research Methods

Research Experience

Dissertation Research

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Research as a RA @ 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.

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.

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]

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

Survey of Learner's Knowledge Structure. This project investigated how learners build and organize concepts in the course of learning.

Derris Digital Image Collection. This project constructed a prototype digital image library for Derris collection, one of the special collections at the University of Tennessee library. [Check out the example record]

Last updated: 1/4/2009