Rsearch student from School of design @ PolyU visiting the HCI group at Karlstad University

Her research topic is:

Smart Communication in Lifestyles under Transformation: Exploring Smart Mobile Devices User Experience among Youth in Hong Kong

Xin’s research interests are in user behaviour, user experience, human-computer interaction and industrial design. She was a visiting scholar at the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at the Carnegie Mellon University, United States in 2015. She also participated and presented her research in some international conferences during the period of thesis writing, such as MobileHCI 2015 in Copenhagen and QUIS 14 in Shanghai.
Four years ago, she started to propose the topic for her PhD study. That time, she discussed with her supervisor how to carry out the studies. One year later, she had a confirmation which is the qualification to continue the PhD study. For that, she narrowed down the scope of study into young people in Hong Kong.
For this research, she created two questionnaires, conducted several focus group interviews and observations in Kowloon, a busy district of Hong Kong.
In the discussion that followed her presentation at the seminar at Information Systems October 5, it was brought up that the overuse of smart devices doesn’t contribute face-to-face communication but even prevents it. Xin agrees with the fact that more people focus on their screen, but she also regards the new technology as an opportunity. She advises to find the balance between virtual and face-to-face communication. In her thesis, she also mentioned some current issues of overuse of smart mobile devices and gave some examples related to existing design solutions.
Xin’s background is Interaction Design; it is an interdisciplinary discipline related to HCI field. She enjoys the opportunity to get feedback from scholars in Information Systems and to exchange ideas. She tells that at School of Design, it is undergrads and master students who do design projects, while the PhD students are much more oriented to Sociology investigating designed artefects social impacts rather than doing design research themselves.

Xin at the Information System's Usability Lab.
 
Author: Lou Hinterberg (internship from Hochschule Hannover)