HCII Thesis Defense: Tianying Chen

One of the most common barriers to seeking mental health treatment is the availability of mental health professionals. Experiential training, though essential for developing therapy skills, is also one of the most expensive and resource-intensive components, as it often requires individualized supervision that is difficult to scale. More informal resources like peer-based counseling face similar problems, where volunteers often receive limited training, leading to difficulties in applying skills effectively and high turnover rates. These challenges highlight the need for more scalable and flexible approaches to experiential skill training.

My thesis addresses the problem of experiential training by developing an accessible system to facilitate the experiential learning of psychotherapy skills. In the first part of my thesis, I use an exploratory qualitative study of the challenges novices face when learning a new therapy skill, motivational interviewing (MI),  on the peer-counselor population to identify the challenges that novice peer-counselors face and suggest three windows to provide scaffolding for skill development: before, during, and after a support session. Based on these findings, in the second part of my thesis, I present the design of the Pin-MI platform, which guides reflective learning through the use of real-time annotation during practice role play sessions, and post-session collaborative peer-based discussion. I conduct a qualitative evaluation of Pin-MI with nurses and care providers, a population not traditionally trained in mental health services but often requiring such skills in their day-to-day functions. I describe the learning strategies with Pin-MI as well as feedback on its perceived effectiveness, including how participants used real-time annotation to capture moments of successful or difficult skill use, and how post-session reflection helped them analyze conversational choices, deepen empathy, and generate alternative strategies for future interactions.

Finally, I conduct a case study of  Pin-MI in two real-world deployments: at a crisis hotline and a university course to understand how it can be adapted in situ and beyond MI. I find that   although Pin-MI was originally created for psychotherapy practice, participants found value in applying it to broader conversational skills. Core features such as real-time annotation and post-session reflection supported transferability across different disciplines and stakes, showing how the system could scaffold both high-stakes clinical encounters and lower-stakes peer learning. This demonstrates Pin-MI’s potential as a generalizable tool for conversational skills training beyond its original therapeutic context. In addition, the sociotechnical infrastructure influenced implementation, including institutional scripts, social arrangements, and technology readiness. For example, tight scheduling constraints in both the hotline and classroom contexts made it difficult to align Pin-MI sessions with participants’ existing routines, directly shaping how consistently the system was used and how deeply learners could engage.

My thesis offers both theoretical and practical contributions. Practically, it delivers in-depth design rationale and exploratory field trials of the Pin-MI system, demonstrating its potential to transform experiential skills training. Theoretically, it advances models for scaffolding experiential learning, suggests design implications for building cross-domain tools, and identifies key elements of the sociotechnical infrastructure needed to successfully implement such systems. My thesis advances a vision for technology-supported experiential learning. It argues for training tools that respect attention in the moment, cultivate reflection afterward, and align with organizational realities, offering insights for reflection- and feedback-based conversational tool designs.