February 2025
Service Design
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Goal: promote transparency to ensure users have necessary information to make proper health-related decisions.
While in college, my specific major placed a huge amount of emphasis on primary sources and immersion in the academic publishing sphere. Multiple class curricula centered entirely around reading, dissecting and applying methods from a tailored collection of peer-reviewed academic articles.
My long-term goal was to delve deeper into academia and eventually by a researcher myself. I had a change of heart once I saw what more applied research looked like while working in this particular lab. I loved knowing that I was contributing to a tangible result rather than sending a paper into the world not knowing what would be done with its contents.
In other words, working in this lab was a huge game-changer for me: it prompted some serious rethinking regarding my career trajectory. It ultimately led me to discover UXR and subsequently design.
In Spring of 2019, I started as a research assistant in an on-campus lab in the Epidemiology and Biostatistics Department. Along with about ~20 others, I was offered the opportunity to be a volunteer research assistant: to offer support to the lab facilitators in a variety of forms. I ended up working cross-functionally on a few different teams: literature review, data collection, content strategy, and policy analysis.
A few months into working with the lab, the scope narrowed so that all volunteer research assistants were working on the same tasks: data collection, data cleaning, and data coding.
I contributed about ~10-20 hours of my time per week to the lab. There was almost never a ‘typical day’ but by the end, I was spending 90% of my time conducting interviews and gathering data.
One of the final products of the lab’s research is a web-based geolocated directory of ‘crisis pregnancy centers.’
Crisis pregnancy centers are nonprofit organizations with a primary aim of keeping women from having abortions.
The goals of the research were to: 1) to “help individuals seeking health services know which centers are CPCs” and 2) to “facilitate further academic research related to CPCs”
Government funding for crisis pregnancy centers is increasing nationwide. This trend has persisted since my time working in this lab.
There is a growing number of well-funded ‘Crisis Pregnancy Centers’ in the United States - especially in states that have enacted abortion-related legislation.
I conducted 750+ interviews across 14 U.S. states. My fellow research assistants and I collectively gathered data from all 50 U.S. states and acquired over 20,000 new data points,
We used the ‘mystery shopper methodology’ to conduct interviews and gather new data as well as verify data that had already been collected by previous research assistants.
Each semester, new goals were outlined. Our research topics therefore changed: sometimes they focused on services, while other times they focused on operations (location, operating hours, etc).
There is a web-based geolocated directory of all data acquired; previous cohorts as well as my own have all been individual contributors to this directory. The site is a product of the original research goals: 1) to “help individuals seeking health services know which centers are CPCs” and 2) to “facilitate further academic research related to CPCs”
The facilitators of the lab have published a few works featuring the data collected from this lab. They have also been cited by a few major news organizations:
I had no idea what to expect when I started working in the lab. It turned out to be one of the most rewarding experiences of my college career. It changed my career ambitions entirely and felt like the first time where my research contributions would end up in a tangible solution.
Many undergraduates are offered the opportunity to contribute to academic research; typically, many are doing in-lab work or helping to write surveys - methods (often quantitative) that don’t involve dealing with other humans. In order to become a seasoned researcher, one must acquire more ethics and proper research training: cue the “do no harm” mentality.
Looking back, I now see that this research was a unique opportunity to be a part of. I got the chance to talk to other humans in order to gather data. I consider this lab to be the first official experience where I conducted interviews, collected data and helped to turn it into a solution: product design, of sorts.
The world of UX/Product is always talking about the difference between quantitative and qualitative data collection: when, how, why, etc. This lab experience is something I think back on constantly because it was a unique blend: quantitative captured using a qualitative method. It was a unique blend of methods and one that gave me a solid background in conducting user/stakeholder interviews.
