Overview of my PhD Contributions

I have directed a range of qualitative research initiatives informing a framework for cultural relevance that enhances the equity of health tracking technologies for families in marginalized communities. The new framework I propose in my dissertation will enable researchers and designers to create technologies that respond to the diversity of individuals and the socioeconomic contexts where they experience health, instead of making sweeping assumptions based on race, income, gender, or age, or focusing solely on behavioral health targets.

These initiatives encompass:

Generating Design Requirements

Community-driven co-design sessions, interviews, and focus groups with parents from marginalized communities, to gain insights into their successes and challenges with health technologies and identify design directions for culturally relevant prototypes. From these sessions, I discovered that:

Although parents of the same racial/ethnic background and immigration status share some cultural beliefs that influence their parenting, they vary immensely in their health priorities for their family and how they use technology to support their family.
Parents from different backgrounds prefer technology when it is flexible and tailored to their personal and family needs and can change with them over time.

Validating Design Requirements

Concept testing of a culturally relevant chatbot interface using wireframes to test and refine design requirements. These sessions helped me identify:

The qualities of a chatbot that can understand and respond to differences for each unique individual or family interacting with it.
Innovative features of how the chatbot can integrate with other technologies, people, and systems that families are interacting with already.

Creating Actionable Guidance for Technology Practitioners

The creation and validation of a heuristic evaluation method that enables designers to evaluate culturally relevant factors in all stages of design processes (i.e., from ideation to continuous monitoring).

Identifying Opportunities in the Field

A content analysis and systematic literature review of the market of >300 child development support mobile apps and related academic literature, to identify research and design gaps and opportunities in the field. I found that:

There is a need for technologies that provide unique insights to families, rather than simply summarizing data, suggesting generic guidance, visualizing health data into charts, and focusing on individual behaviors instead of context.
Researchers and designers haven’t employed user-centered design methods in this space, and have not yet engaged with the communities who are often excluded from technology innovation processes.