School of Social Sciences, Humanities, and Arts

The field of industry User Experience (UX) Research is applied by large scale companies, small startups, and all in between. Companies rely on this research to understand their target audience and determine how to make their product successful in the hands of the consumer. The present work details the projects completed during a UX Research internship for a startup company developing a social media app and relates these experiences to both the coursework within UC Merced’s Cognitive and Information Sciences’ graduate program and cognitive science as a field. These projects include an analysis regarding a mood tracking feature and comparisons to competitor apps, literature reviews on conflict related to friend groups and teenager/young adult social environments, and beta testing of the app in development.