United States

UX Research

Bachelor of Science

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Master

Youyang Hou

User Research Manager

Product strategy

Problem-solving

Python

Research lead for Core Products and AI teams

• Led strategic research for Lyft Express Drive and Flexdrive teams on driver and
renter experience to inform design and business decisions
• Led mixed-methods research (lit review, interview, survey, focus group) on new
electrification initiative and inform company-wide EV product roadmaps

•	Led strategic and tactical research (diary study, interview, survey, usability testing) to define product and design strategy for Flutter DevTools, Flutter DevExp, and Flutter Multiplatform Dev
•	Led a foundational research initiative for understanding Flutter developer Critical User Journey (CUJ) using mixed-methods (interview, Maxdiff survey, workshop, metrics, class) to inform product roadmaps and improve product excellence

•	Led generative and tactical research for a new Google Cloud website (cloud.google.com) in close collaboration with xfn stakeholders (design, data science, engineer, marketing)
•	Owned strategic and tactical research for the “0->1” projects such as Cloud Java experience and Cloud Code

• Planned and conducted mobile surveys and interviews to investigate the social impact of Beijing Design Week, which supported Beijing government planning of historic districts.
• Synthesized findings to inform the design of the Social Impact GIS data analytics system.

• Conducted competitor analysis to explore the best practices of competitor events apps to inform the ideation of Facebook events discovery product.
• Led user interviews and large-scale surveys to understand users events discovery behaviors and improved the events discovery dashboard and events recommendations algorithms.
• Conducted lab-based in-person and remote prototype testing to support team’s decision making on early-stage design scenarios.

• Assisted in teaching 5 undergraduate and master courses ranging from 40 to 200 students.
• Managed teams of teaching assistants and graders to prepare course materials and grade
assignments.

SI 588: Fundamental of Human Behaviors
Lead weekly discussion sections of 60 students about fundamental HCI theories

SI 500: Information in Social Systems
Lead weekly discussion sections of 40 students about information theories

SI 429: E-Communities
Teach a class of 40 students about social science theories regarding online communities. Graded students assignments

SI 110: Introduction to Information Science 
Managed a team of 8 GSI and graders

• Conducted card sorting and surveys on 2000+ SMB advertisers that increased the completion rate of the Ads Creation product and informed the design of mobile Ads Creation product.
• Interviewed SMB advertisers about their user experience of Facebook Ads Preferences to inform the design of Facebook Ads Preferences and Targeting products.
• Conducted exploratory data analysis on 4000+ user photos data to understand users photo sharing behaviors and informed the design of Facebook Moments app.

Conducted HCI research on how to better develop online community platforms and offline community technologies. The research centered on understanding (1) current user perceptions and behaviors surrounding privacy, newcomer socialization and contributions.  (2) nonprofit organization and government adoption of social media and civic technologies. 
By better understanding these user aspects of online and offline community platforms, researchers and designers are able to better foster user contribution, engagement, and socialization, as well as facilitate the innovative technology adoption in public organizations. 

Key projects included:
• Led ethnographic research, interviews, and surveys to understand the design process of civic hacking, which improved the School of Information community engagement program.
• Conducted surveys, content analysis, and interviews to understand nonprofits social media
use. Results were published in the national leading nonprofits journal Nonprofit Quarterly.
• Conducted surveys and content analysis research to understand Facebook users privacy and
information seeking behaviors that led to publications in top HCI conferences

PSY101 Introduction of Psychology
PSY395 Measurement and Research Design

• Conducted lab experiments, eye-tracking, and fMRI studies to investigate the neural mechanism of visual perception that led to publications on top psychology journals.
• Performed multivariate analysis, classification analysis, and clustering analysis on large-scale neuroimaging data to investigate high-dimensional neural patterns.

• Conducted and analyzed consumer behavior through web surveys for Tencent users
• Organized and created marketing research reports for 10+ Tencent web products.

• Conducted lab experiments, EEG, and surveys studies to investigate the neural
mechanism of the cultural differences of social cognition with 30+ subjects.

Youyang Hou🇺🇸

About Youyang Hou

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