Jacob Solomon
Research to understand how the user experience and interface design of intelligent systems (e.g. recommender systems, tools for analytics and data science, expert systems etc.) influences the decisions people make. Active
Designing and evaluating a system to let people automate tasks related to their healthcare by integrating different apps or devices. Active
Designed and developed screeningdecision.com, a site that helps clinicians make personalized decisions about cancer screening. Active
MyLabResults.org (coming soon) is an app that will produce effective, evidence-based visualizations of test results to help patients understand what they mean. Active
A series of economics experiments to evaluate different designs for crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter or Donor's Choose.
A series of studies about how fledgling online communities should be designed in order to grow and establish a critical mass of participation.
Worked with open.michigan to design and evaluate OERca, a tool to help educators create open educational resources.
A survey about people's attitudes and beliefs regarding behavioral advertising.
How do people allocate their attention across the many different actors who influence their interaction with a computer (e.g. the computer itself, software, servers, other users, programmers, companies etc.)
A usability evaluation of a self-service photo kiosk.
A series of usability reports about MTagger, a social bookmarking feature embedded within the University of Michigan Library web tools.
A usability evaluation for the University of Michigan Comprehensive Cancer Center.
A class project supervised by Microsoft researchers evaluating the tagging feature within Microsoft OneNote. Class Project
A class project to build a social itenerary recommender system. Class Project
A food storage inventory app, designed as a class project. Class Project
People's health information is scattered across fragmented systems, making it hard to get the right info at the right place and time in order to make good health decisions. I am designing and studying a platform that emulates sites like ifttt.com and Microsoft Flow (which currently have very little integration with health systems) to see whether this style of end-user-programmed integration of different systems and personal informatics automation can help people fill gaps in functionality and improve overall access and usability of health IT, and ultimately make better health decisions.
Workshop on Interactive Systems in Healthcare (WISH) 2017 paper
Working with Dr. Sameer Saini at the Ann Arbor VA, I have designed and developed an online decision aid to help clinicians decide whether the benefits of a colonoscopy are worth the risks for a patient given some individual characteristics. This aid can help clinicians make more personalized decisions about screening and highlights some particular examples of patients whose risk and benefit from screening runs counterintuitively from established guidelines.
I currently work on an AHRQ-funded grant
to design meaningful visualizations of medical test results to patients that can be displayed in online patient portals. In addition to empirical studies evaluating these visualizations, we are developing a web application and javascript library to allow these visualizations to be integrated into patient portals (demos available soon!)
Is This Good or Bad? Redesigning Visual Displays of Medical Test Results in Patient Portals to Provide Context and Meaning (CHI'16 Extended Abstracts) Graphics Help Patients Distinguish Between Urgent and Non-Urgent Deviations in Laboratory Test Results (JAMIA)
My dissertation research looked at the ways that the design of intelligent decision aids (decision aids that use artificial intelligence or similarly sophisticated computation to make recommendations to decision makers) can create decision making biases.
I found that the customizability of the system, the transparency, and users expectations of its efficacy can cause users to agree with system recommendations regardless of what recommendations are given.
Going forward, I plan to extend this research to the design of tools for data science. How can we design tools that enable data scientists to both uncover important insights and make good decisions from data?
Heterogeneity in Customization of Recommender Systems By Users With Homogenous Preferences (CHI '16) Decision Biases in Agreement with Intelligent Decision Aids (Dissertation)
I have worked with Rick Wash to study how the design of crowdfunding platforms influences users' ability to coordinate their collective efforts and successfully fund projects.
Our research has mainly involved controlled lab experiments that simulate crowds on a crowdfunding site, where we have found that the style of crowdfunding (All-or-nothing vs. Keep-it-all) and the timing of donations have important consequences for project outcomes.
I have studied the design of Online Communities with my PhD advisor Rick Wash, where have found that early contributions to online communities set an expectation for newcomers about what is required, and that if new users do not see the existing content on a site they are likely to contribute more.
We have also found that communities should be designed to attract members rather than content, as communities such as WikiProjects on Wikipedia will have more long-term growth if they attract many new people rather than getting a smaller number of people to contribute more content.
I did UX design and usabilty testing for OERca, a tool that allowed users to clear educational content of copyright restrictions so it can be openly published. More info about this tool is available on Github
Source Orientation (HFES '14) Nominated for best paper at the Human Factors and Ergonmics Society User Experience Day
