Safe Interactions Lab
Stratford School of Interaction Design and Business, University of Waterloo.
How might we create useful, usable, and delightful digital experiences while enabling secure and safe interactions?
Professor Leah Zhang-Kennedy leads the Safe Interactions Lab focusing on understanding and developing digital experiences that improve people's understanding, knowledge, and technology practices through research and design. We use human-centred research methods and tools that span multiple disciplines in human-computer interaction (HCI), user experience (UX), and user interface (UI) design to answer research questions relating to digital literacy, online privacy, and computer security. Our goal is to develop and nurture a collaborative multidisciplinary research team with diverse backgrounds to approach these issues from various perspectives.
Research Projects
Visit our Projects page to learn more about our current and completed research projects.
Research Areas
human-computer interaction (HCI), usable privacy and security, user experience (UX), child-computer interaction, information visualisation, persuasive technology
News
Christos defends MASc thesis in HCI
Christos Karanassios successfully defended his Master's Thesis in Human-Computer Interaction titled "Towards Security-Focused Developer Personas". Christos is co-supervised by Prof. Leah Zhang-Kennedy (University of Waterloo) and Prof. Hala Assal (Carleton University).
Congratulations Christos!
Journal paper published at IJHCI
Our paper titled Comprehending the Crypto-Curious: How Investors and Inexperienced Potential Investors Perceive and Practice Cryptocurrency Trading led by Prof. Ville Mäkelä (Stratford School) and PhD Candidate Hilda Hadan is published in the International Journal of Human–Computer Interaction.
Ph.D. student Jen (JaeEun) Shin joins the Safe Interactions Lab
We welcome Jen (JaeEun) Shin, a new Ph.D. student in System Design Engineering at the University of Waterloo, to the Safe Interaction Lab in Fall 2023! Jen will start her research working on a project titled “Children and Parents’ Mental Models of Security and Privacy in Humanoid Robots” to investigate families’ perceptions of security and privacy risks associated with robots for education and entertainment.
Contact
Leah Zhang-Kennedy
Assistant Professor, Interaction Design and User Experience Research
Stratford School of Interaction Design and Business
University of Waterloo
E: lzhangkennedy@uwaterloo.ca