About
I hold a Ph.D. in Industrial Design, with a focus on HCI, from KAIST, a leading science and technology institute in South Korea. As a recipient of a national full scholarship, I studied conversational AI at the Next Interface Lab under the supervision of Prof. Sangsu Lee. In addition, through my undergraduate and master's studies, I developed a strong academic foundation in user experience design (UXD) and user experience research (UXR) for digital products.
Qualitative Research Methods
Interviews, focus groups, observational studies, (modified) Wizard-of-Oz studies, participatory design workshops, and diary studies; qualitative data coding and codebook, conversation analysis, thematic analysis, and inter-coder reliability assessment.
Quantitative Research Methods
User experience evaluation using standardized UX-related measures such as NASA-TLX, SUS, UEQ, SAM, and TAM; statistical analyses, including t-tests, ANOVA, correlation analysis, and regression analysis, for condition comparisons and the identification of factors influencing user experience.
Research Design and Academic Writing
Academic writing skills and systematic structuring of research papers and proposals, including logical framing, articulation of clear research questions, design of valid and rigorous methodologies, and development of insightful and meaningful findings.
My background bridges HCI research and industry practice. While developing my academic expertise in HCI, I have also gained almost five years of hands-on experience in digital and AI products as a UX designer and product manager. This experience allows me to approach HCI research with both academic rigor and a practical understanding of how research insights translate into real-world products and user experiences.
Data-Driven Analysis and Decision-Making
Product KPI definition, key metric tracking, product performance monitoring, SQL-based data extraction, insight identification, hypothesis validation, and actionable product improvement.
Digital Product UX/UI Design
Extensive experience planning and designing UX/UI for diverse digital products, including mobile, web, TV, tablet, wearable, and conversational AI.
Project Management and Communication
Effective communication and collaboration with researchers, designers, developers, engineers, business teams, clients, and relevant stakeholders across academic and industry settings.
Prompt Engineering Techniques
Prompt design for generative and conversational AI using techniques including few-shot prompting, persona-based prompting, Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting, and output-format control.
When the first smartphones were introduced, I was a first-year undergraduate student. I became interested in how digital products could change people’s everyday lives. I continued to explore this interest by studying digital product design in a master’s program in the UK. I then began my professional career at a digital product agency, where I planned and designed a range of digital products. Through these projects, I found myself particularly drawn to exploring future user experiences enabled by emerging technologies. This interest eventually led me to pursue a Ph.D.
When I began my doctoral studies, Amazon Alexa was becoming widely available. I started researching voice interaction, focusing on how conversational agents should proactively communicate with users in the smart home. As large language models and generative AI advanced, interacting with AI through natural language became more seamless and increasingly important. I have continued to deepen my research on conversational AI across chat- and voice-based interactions, including inclusive service contexts and character AI chat services.
Looking ahead, I hope to broaden my research to embodied AI, including robots and wearables. I aim to work across Human–AI/Robot Interaction, considering both user-centered and more-than-human perspectives. I seek to understand the ontological position of AI beyond a simple human–machine binary, as well as how users come to perceive AI as a social presence and how this perception shapes their interactions and experiences across diverse service contexts.