Michael Zarro
User Experience Researcher/Designer and Information Architect
Philadelphia PA
mzarro@gmail.com
I research and design engaging and innovative user experiences. I have an MSLIS from Drexel University, and currently am completing a Ph.D. focusing on user experience and human-computer interaction at the Drexel University College of Information Science and Technology. My professional experience includes leading design efforts on one of the largest customer facing e-commerce networks in the world (1 Billion+ annual sales), and designing systems in the health sciences and technology start up environments.
My most recent research investigates user behaviors of people using the Web to self-manage a chronic health condition, exploring how people use the Web over an extended period of time, and how organizations like medical websites and social media can support information seeking and use. I was awarded an IMLS research fellowship to support this work.
Publications, etc.
Towards A Conceptual Model of Long-Term Online Health Information Behavior. Zarro, M. (2013).The Seventh Symposium on Human-Computer Interaction and Information Retrieval, HCIR2013, Vancouver BC.
Wedding Dresses and Wanted Criminals: Pinterest.com as an Infrastructure for Repository Building. Zarro, M., Hall, C., & Forte, A. (2013). Seventh International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM 2013).
Exploring Social Curation. Zarro, M., & Hall, C. (2012) D-Lib Magazine 18(11/12). November/December 2012.
Social Curation on the Website Pinterest.com. Hall, C. & Zarro, M. (2012). Proceedings of ASIS&T 75th Annual Meeting (ASIST 2012).
Developing A Dual-Process Information Seeking Model for Exploratory Search. Zarro, M. (2012). The Sixth Symposium on Human-Computer Interaction and Information Retrieval, HCIR2012, Cambridge MA.
Using Social Tags and Controlled Vocabularies As Filters for Searching and Browsing: A Health Science Experiment. Zarro, M. & Lin, X. (2011). The Fifth Workshop on Human-Computer Interaction and Information Retrieval, HCIR2011, Mountain View CA.
What Do You Call it? A Comparison of Library-Created and User-Created Tags. Hall, C. & Zarro, M. (2011). Proceedings of the 11th Annual ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries, JCDL 2011 (pp. 53-56).
A Study of User Queries Leading to a Health Information Website – AfterTheInjury.org. Yang, C., Winston, F., Zarro, M., & Kassam-Adams, N. (2011). Proceedings of the iConference 2011, Seattle WA.
User-Contributed Descriptive Metadata for Libraries and Cultural Institutions. Zarro, M. & Allen, R. (2010). In M. Lalmas, J. Jose, A. Rauber, F. Sebastiani, & I. Frommholz (Eds.), Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries, Lecture Notes in Computer Science (Vol. 6273, pp. 46-54). Springer Berlin / Heidelberg.
Peer-Reviewed Posters
Mobile Health Search Enhanced with Social Tags. Zarro, M. (2012). Poster presented at Medicine 2.0, Boston MA.
Pinterest: Social Collecting for #linking #using #sharing
Zarro, M. & Hall, C. (2012). Poster presented at the 2012 ACM / IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL2012).
Healthcare Information Behavior: Implicit Collaboration with Social Tagging Systems. Zarro, M. (2011). Poster presented at The 2011 International Conference on Collaboration Technologies and Systems (CTS 2011).
Extending Library Collections Using Web 2.0 and Flickr.com
Zarro, M. (2010). Poster presented at the Library Research Seminar-V 2010, University of Maryland
Doctoral Consortia
2012 ACM / IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL2012)
2012 ACM SIGHIT International Health Informatics Symposium (IHI2012)
Recent Projects
A Conceptual Model of Online Information Behavior in the Chronic Disease Trajectory
My dissertation research investigating online health search behaviors, changes in cognitive processing, and learning over time while managing a chronic health condition.Social Curating
My collaborators and I are exploring users' social collecting and sharing activites, what we call "social curating," on social media sites like Pinterest.
Meaningful Concept Displays
I am working with a team at Drexel and other institutions to investige taxonomy and ontology visualization, to create innovative search interfaces and systems.
Teaching Experience
Instructor: Information Architecture (INFO658), Digital Library Technologies (INFO657), and Digital Libraries (INFO653) at Drexel University
Masters Thesis Lead: Yara Safadi, The University of the Arts
Teaching Assistant: Computer Supported Collaborative Work (INFO405), Drexel University
Professional Mentor: Information Architecture Institute
Instructor and Mentor: Summer Multimedia Development Institute, Bryn Mawr College