Research
My work focuses on Digital Wellbeing and Deceptive Designs, with prior contributions in End User Development.
Digital Wellbeing
Investigating how technology affects habits, wellbeing, and self-control through empirical research on digital self-control tools, multi-device interactions, and educational approaches. My work focuses on understanding habitual smartphone use, developing effective self-control mechanisms, and creating educational systems that promote healthier technology relationships.
Digital Self‑Control Tools
Evaluating and designing mechanisms like blocking, nudging, and goal setting that help people align technology use with their values and wellbeing goals.
Examples
Habitual Behaviors
Understanding and analyzing habitual smartphone use patterns, developing tools to help users break unhealthy digital habits, and creating interventions for meaningful behavior change.
Examples
Educational Systems
Creating educational frameworks and curricula that teach mindful human-computer interaction, digital wellbeing principles, and responsible technology design practices.
Examples
Selected Publications
- Am I in Control? How the Design of the TikTok Feed Shapes Users’ Sense of Agency
- What is Digital Wellbeing? A Leverage Points Framework to Guide Research and Action
- Achieving Digital Wellbeing Through Digital Self-Control Tools: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis
- Coping with Digital Wellbeing in a Multi-Device World
- The Race Towards Digital Wellbeing: Issues and Opportunities
Deceptive Designs
Research on dark patterns and manipulative interface strategies that capture and exploit user attention, their impact on user autonomy and wellbeing, and approaches to identify, measure, and mitigate them in practice. My work focuses on understanding how digital interfaces steal attention and developing design heuristics that respect rather than exploit user attention.
Attention-Capture Damaging Patterns
Defining and identifying attention capture deceptive designs in digital interfaces, understanding how dark patterns steal user attention.
Examples
Digital Attention Heuristics
Developing design heuristics and frameworks that support user attention by design, creating interfaces that respect rather than exploit attention.
Examples
Wellbeing‑Focused Design
Bridging digital wellbeing and usability through design interfaces that respect user attention and promote meaningful interactions.
Selected Publications
- The Digital Attention Heuristics: Supporting the User's Attention by Design
- Digital Wellbeing Lens: Design Interfaces That Respect User Attention
- Defining and Identifying Attention Capture Deceptive Designs in Digital Interfaces
- Towards Understanding the Dark Patterns That Steal Our Attention
End User Development Previous Focus
Empowering people to personalize connected devices and online services without programming expertise. My research spans semantic approaches to IoT personalization, voice-based rule composition, debugging mechanisms for trigger–action programming, and educational tools that make end-user development accessible across diverse technological contexts.
High Level Rule Composition
Enabling natural language interaction for defining trigger–action rules through conversational interfaces and voice commands.
Examples
Debugging
Creating intuitive debugging tools using metaphors like jigsaw puzzles to help users understand and troubleshoot trigger–action programming issues.
Examples
Recommendations
Developing intelligent recommendation systems that help users discover and compose effective trigger–action rules based on their context and preferences.
Examples
Selected Publications
- From Users' Intentions to IF-THEN Rules in the Internet of Things
- RecRules: Recommending IF-THEN Rules for End-User Development
- Empowering End Users in Debugging Trigger-Action Rules
- A Debugging Approach for Trigger-Action Programming
- A High-Level Approach Towards End User Development in the IoT