Prospective Graduate Students / Postdocs
This faculty member is currently not actively recruiting graduate students or Postdoctoral Fellows, but might consider co-supervision together with another faculty member.
Heather O'Brien
Associate Professor
Research Classification
Research Interests
user engagement
user experience
community engagement
information seeking and retrieval
information access
cognitive processes related to information searching and evaluation
health technologies
Relevant Degree Programs
Affiliations to Research Centres, Institutes & Clusters
Research Options
I am available and interested in collaborations (e.g. clusters, grants).
I am interested in and conduct interdisciplinary research.
I am interested in working with undergraduate students on research projects.
Research Methodology
questionnaire development and evaluation
search behaviour
User-centred Design
Great Supervisor Week Mentions
Each year graduate students are encouraged to give kudos to their supervisors through social media and our website as part of #GreatSupervisorWeek. Below are students who mentioned this supervisor since the initiative was started in 2017.
Heather O'Brien always makes time in her schedule for students. The best thing about her: she views our mistakes as opportunities to teach us something new. She's always positive about our work and ideas. I'm so grateful to have such an incredible advocate. #greatsupervisor #UBC
Graduate Student Supervision
Doctoral Student Supervision
Dissertations completed in 2010 or later are listed below. Please note that there is a 6-12 month delay to add the latest dissertations.
Viewing immigrant labour integration through an intersectional lens: information and identity in the settlement of African immigrants to Metro Vancouver, British Columbia (2020)
Background: Many immigrants arrive in Canada in hopes of finding a better life for themselves and their families. Securing meaningful employment positions immigrants to have a meaningful quality of life and contribute to the host countries’ society and economy. Access to information about employment is crucial to this process and yet inadequately understood. Objectives: This research sought to determine the kinds of information that African immigrants value when seeking meaningful employment, how they access employment information, what information services are available to support immigrant labour integration, how participants utilized these and how these services could be enhanced, and finally, any relationships among participants’ multifaceted identities, information and employment.Methods: Data were collected through qualitative document analysis of information presented on the websites of settlement and employment agencies in five Metro Vancouver cities, and semi-structured interviews with 25 Black African immigrants in Metro Vancouver. The interview incorporated Information World Mapping, an arts-based elicitation activity. Data were analyzed using qualitative content analysis.Results: The document analysis revealed an abundance of employment support being offered to immigrants. However, the interviews revealed that participants utilized only a few of these. The interviews also explained this gap and highlighted opportunities for providing information that participants deemed more relevant to them. Participants valued three types of employment information and obtained these both serendipitously and purposefully through a variety of information sources. Sources of information included institutions in Canada, online sources and other people. Participants’ pre-migration employment expectations contrasted with realities in Canada, while intersectional factors such as immigration status and gender were found to be major determinants of employment and information access. Conclusion: This research has made contributions to theory, research methods and the practice of information provision. This project also demonstrates the generative capacity of a novel research method for this type of inquiry and population. This has led to significant methodological insights. Finally, results of the study suggest that employment information provision that accounts for the intersectional identities of the recipients could be valuable in making support more relevant for immigrants. Future research could explore the dynamics of such intersectional information provision.
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Master's Student Supervision
Theses completed in 2010 or later are listed below. Please note that there is a 6-12 month delay to add the latest theses.
A systematic review of mindfulness mobile apps: considering content quality and user engagement elements (2021)
No abstract available.
The impact of task type and domain expertise on information searching behaviours in a full text digital (2020)
No abstract available.
Transgender information seeking: a collaborative approach to supporting the information needs of transgender people (2020)
No abstract available.
Using Japanese sources for academic research: information-seeking behaviours of graduate students (2020)
No abstract available.
Exploring the information contexts of young fathers in two British Columbian cities (2018)
No abstract available.
The design process: designing information technology for the public sphere (2010)
No abstract available.
Publications
- Exploring the relationship between personalized feedback models, learning design and assessment outcomes (2022)
Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education - Questioning the role of information poverty in immigrant employment acquisition: empirical evidence from African immigrants in Canada (2022)
Journal of Documentation - Reconfiguring Knowledge Ecosystems: Librarians and Adult Literacy Educators in Knowledge Exchange Work (2022)
Journal of Higher Education Outreach and Engagement, 26 (2), 29-46 - Rethinking (Dis)engagement in human-computer interaction (2022)
Computers in Human Behavior, 128 - Supporting Self-management and Quality of Life in Bipolar Disorder With the PolarUs App (Alpha): Protocol for a Mixed Methods Study (2022)
JMIR Research Protocols, 11 (8) - The effects of domain and search expertise on learning outcomes in digital library use (2022)
CHIIR 2022 - Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval, 202-210 - Rethinking Interest in Studies of Interactive Information Retrieval (2021)
CHIIR 2021 - Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval, 39-49 - Use of smartphone apps in bipolar disorder: An international web-based survey of feature preferences and privacy concerns (2021)
Journal of Affective Disorders, 295, 1102-1109 - “Nothing's available”: Young fathers’ experiences with unmet information needs and barriers to resolving them (2020)
Information Processing and Management, 57 (2) - An empirical study of interest, task complexity, and search behaviour on user engagement (2020)
Information Processing and Management, 57 (3) - Beyond clicks and downloads: A call for a more comprehensive approach to measuring mobile-health app engagement (2020)
BJPsych Open, 6 (5) - Digital Health and Engagement - Looking behind the Measures and Methods (2020)
JAMA Network Open, 3 (7) - Greetings from the CHIIR 2020 general chairs (2020)
CHIIR 2020 - Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval, iii - Greetings from the CHIIR 2020 general chairs (2020)
CHIIR 2020 - Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval, iii - The role of domain knowledge in search as learning (2020)
CHIIR 2020 - Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval, 313-317 - Visual analysis of information world maps: An exploration of four methods (2020)
Journal of Information Science, 46 (3), 361-377 - (How) should information world maps be visually analyzed? (2018)
Proceedings of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 55 (1), 817-818 - A practical approach to measuring user engagement with the refined user engagement scale (UES) and new UES short form (2018)
International Journal of Human Computer Studies, 112, 28-39 - Modeling antecedents of user engagement (2018)
The Handbook of Communication Engagement, 73-88 - Rhythms of everyday life in mobile information seeking: Reflections on a photo-diary study (2018)
Library Trends, 66 (4), 535-567 - The effects of manipulating task determinability on search behaviors and outcomes (2018)
41st International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, SIGIR 2018, 445-454 - The role of information resources in young fathers' parenting experiences (2018)
Proceedings of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 55 (1), 387-396 - User engagement in an open collaboration community after the insertion of a game design element: An online field experiment (2018)
Americas Conference on Information Systems 2018: Digital Disruption, AMCIS 2018 - Young parents’ personal and social information contexts for child feeding practices: An ethnographic study in British Columbia, Canada (2018)
Journal of Documentation, 74 (3), 608-623 - A scoping review of individual differences in information seeking behavior and retrieval research between 2000 and 2015 (2017)
Library and Information Science Research, 39 (3), 244-254 - Antecedents and learning outcomes of online news engagement (2017)
Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 68 (12), 2809-2820 - Asking "good" questions: Questionnaire design and analysis in interactive information retrieval research (2017)
CHIIR 2017 - Proceedings of the 2017 Conference Human Information Interaction and Retrieval, 27-36 - Constructing knowledge and ignorance in the social information worlds of young mothers (2017)
Proceedings of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 54 (1), 139-149 - Information world mapping: A participatory arts-based elicitation method for information behavior interviews (2017)
Library and Information Science Research, 39 (2), 149-157 - Integrating affective responses and gamification into early reading acquisition software applications (2017)
CHI PLAY 2017 Extended Abstracts - Extended Abstracts Publication of the Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play, 73-85 - Learning from the news: The role of topic, multimedia and interest in knowledge retention (2017)
CHIIR 2017 - Proceedings of the 2017 Conference Human Information Interaction and Retrieval, 185-193 - Seeking balance: Professional development needs of tenured information science faculty (2017)
Proceedings of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 54 (1), 580-582 - Conclusions (2016)
Why Engagement Matters: Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives of User Engagement in Digital Media, 219-222 - Investigating the role of user engagement in digital reading environments (2016)
CHIIR 2016 - Proceedings of the 2016 ACM Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval, 71-80 - Life after tenure: Professional development strategies for mid-career faculty (2016)
Proceedings of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 53 (1), 1-4 - Measuring engagement with online forms (2016)
CHIIR 2016 - Proceedings of the 2016 ACM Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval, 325-328 - Preface (2016)
Why Engagement Matters: Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives of User Engagement in Digital Media, xiii-xviii - System and user centered evaluation approaches in interactive information retrieval (SAUCE 2016) (2016)
CHIIR 2016 - Proceedings of the 2016 ACM Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval, 337-339 - The effects of textual environment on reading comprehension: Implications for searching as learning (2016)
Journal of Information Science, 42 (1), 79-93 - The role of information in the settlement experiences of refugee students (2016)
Proceedings of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 53 (1), 1-6 - Theoretical perspectives on user engagement (2016)
Why Engagement Matters: Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives of User Engagement in Digital Media, 1-26 - Translating theory into methodological practice (2016)
Why Engagement Matters: Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives of User Engagement in Digital Media, 27-52 - What makes online news interesting? Personal and situational interest and the effect on behavioral intentions (2016)
Proceedings of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 53 (1), 1-6 - Why engagement matters: Cross-disciplinary perspectives of user engagement in digital media (2016)
Why Engagement Matters: Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives of User Engagement in Digital Media, 1-222 - An empirical evaluation of the User Engagement Scale (UES) in online news environments (2015)
Information Processing and Management, 51 (4), 413-427 - Making an impact through experiential learning (2015)
Proceedings of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 52 (1), 1-4 - Exploring social context in mobile information behavior (2014)
Proceedings of the ASIST Annual Meeting, 51 (1) - What motivates the online news browser? News item selection in a social information seeking scenario (2014)
Information Research, 19 (3) - Examining the generalizability of the User Engagement Scale (UES) in exploratory search (2013)
Information Processing and Management, 49 (5), 1092-1107 - Exploring the Complexities of Information Practices through Arts-Based Research (2013)
Proceedings of the ASIST Annual Meeting, 50 (1) - Mixed-methods approach to measuring user experience in online news interactions (2013)
Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 64 (8), 1543-1556 - Simplifying complexity: Modeling the process of collaboration between artists and scientists (2013)
SIGDOC 2013 - Proceedings of the 31st ACM International Conference on Design of Communication, 113-121 - The use of eReading devices in academic environments (2012)
ACM International Conference Proceeding Series, 473-474 - Capturing the complexity of information interactions: Measurement and evaluation issues (2011)
Proceedings of the ASIST Annual Meeting, 48 - Exploring technology through the design lens: A case study of an interactive museum technology (2011)
ACM International Conference Proceeding Series, 583-590 - Exploring user engagement in online news interactions (2011)
Proceedings of the ASIST Annual Meeting, 48 - Information design in/as serious leisure (2011)
ACM International Conference Proceeding Series, 728-729 - Online synchronous interviewing of the info-savvy (2011)
ACM International Conference Proceeding Series, 649-650 - Weaving the threads of experience into human information interaction (HII): Probing user experience (UX) for new directions in information behaviour (2011)
Library and Information Science, 1, 69-92 - Is there a universal instrument for measuring Interactive Information Retrieval? The case of the User Engagement Scale (2010)
IIiX 2010 - Proceedings of the 2010 Information Interaction in Context Symposium, 335-338 - Supporting semantic navigation (2010)
IIiX 2010 - Proceedings of the 2010 Information Interaction in Context Symposium, 359-362 - The development and evaluation of a survey to measure user engagement (2010)
Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 61 (1), 50-69 - The influence of hedonic and utilitarian motivations on user engagement: The case of online shopping experiences (2010)
Interacting with Computers, 22 (5), 344-352 - Exploring engagement in the qualitative research process (2009)
Proceedings of the ASIST Annual Meeting, 46 - Developing and evaluating a reliable measure of user engagement (2008)
Proceedings of the ASIST Annual Meeting, 45 - Fishing in query pools for task representations (2008)
Proceedings of the ASIST Annual Meeting, 45 - Task effects on interactive search: The query factor (2008)
Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics), 4862 LNCS, 359-372 - Understanding the information and communication technology needs of the e-humanist (2008)
Journal of Documentation, 64 (1), 102-130 - What is user engagement? A conceptual framework for defining user engagement with technology (2008)
Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 59 (6), 938-955 - The information behaviors and preferences of undergraduate students (2005)
Research Strategies, 20 (4), 409-423
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