Tao Zhang

I worked on the design and evaluation of a unmanned vehicle (UV) specialist interface that allows a single human supervisor to monitor and task multiple heterogeneous robots. The interface was designed to decrease the robot to human ratio. It increases the operator's awareness of the broad situation while still allows the operator to interact with each robot at an individual level.

The objective of this study was to understand the effect of different service robot interface features on elderly perceptions and emotional responses in a simulated medicine delivery task. In general, results indicated that adding anthropomorphic and interactive features to service robots promoted positive emotional responses (increased excitement, Galvanic Skin Response, and happiness, Heart Rate) in elderly users. Results from this study could be used as a basis for developing affective robot interface design guidelines to promote user emotional experiences.

eLong.com is one of the biggest travel reservation service companies in China partered with Expedia. Its main business is selling airline tickets, hotel reservations, and vacation packages at discounted price via the company website and telephone booking system. The management wanted to build the next version of the company's website based on user experience research. We were hired as a consulting team to inject the user-centered design concept into the redesign and testing process.

This project conceptualizes cultural differences and explores practice in web portal design for Chinese users. With an experiment study, we examined the effects of design styles on visual search performance and attitudes on Chinese people and proposed design guidelines from results. We also investigated prominent culture patterns in web design from Chinese users' perspective and compared the results with previous studies on US and Korean cultures.

The aim of this project is to gain insight into Chinese users' requirements and expectations of Digital TV, and to identify user interface design challenges to fufill those requirements. This project studied approaches to the localization of Samsung Digital TV product. A competitive analysis between Samsung and existing/potential competitorswas was also conducted.