About Me

Kaitlyn Ouverson, PhD student and researcher, the author of this website.

I am a fourth-year student in the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) graduate program at Iowa State University, and a Design Researcher at IBM. If you ask me what I do, I would tell you that I am a translator of discoveries.

My current research interests center around complex problems, such as the facilitation of group use emerging and extant technologies to enhance their social interaction and the usability of legacy, enterprise products. I also have examined the user experience of games, the usability of commercial products, and the use of virtual and augmented reality by older adults.

I am in love with all things natural, of which I believe creative expression to be the distillation. Technology is a natural human phenomenon, and I first fell in love with it as a child: playing games, digitally altering photos, making my first HTML page. When I realized technology supported jobs outside of pure design, I found my biggest-yet adventure. After learning about research through a lens of psychology and statistics as an undergraduate, I attained my M.S. in HCI in August of 2019, studying how feedback voice and team member individual differences affect team outcomes in a serious game environment. To date, I have crafted 13 surveys, moderated 18 semi-structured interviews, led four teams of cross-disciplinary members, and constructed four behavioral observation protocols. Click here to see my showcased projects!

My main interest is in social interaction. I want to help teammates interact effectively whether they are solving problems in the same room or in the same application. Whereas mobile phones and video games sometimes have a bad wrap as disruptors of social interaction, I see a real opportunity for improving same-place, or co-located, socialization via technology. I am actively exploring the ways otherwise-isolating technology can be used in collaboration and cooperative work.

I have always had a passion for discovery and creativity. When I'm not daydreaming about my next research study, I am poetically recording the world around me. I find time for hiking, playing cooperative multi-player video games, traveling (internationally or locally) with my partner, and spending time with my two kitties and one rescue pup.