Ariful Islam Anik
UX Researcher & Designer · PhD Candidate
Department of Computer Science, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada
I design and study how people interact with AI systems, focusing on what helps them understand, trust, and make better decisions with AI-powered tools. At its core, this is a UX problem: understanding users, prototyping solutions, and testing whether they actually help.
As a PhD researcher at the HCI Lab, University of Manitoba, supervised by Dr. Andrea Bunt, I work across the full UX cycle, designing interfaces, running controlled user studies, and translating findings into actionable design principles. My research has produced multiple peer-reviewed publications at top HCI venues including CHI, IUI, and VL/HCC.
Research Interests
Human-Centered AI
Designing AI systems around what users actually need, with a focus on transparency, trust, and how people evaluate and act on AI outputs.
Human-Computer Interaction
Empirical study of how people interact with technology, using controlled experiments, think-aloud studies, and mixed-methods evaluations to ground design decisions in evidence.
UX Research and Design
End-to-end UX work spanning interface prototyping, user recruitment, study design, and iterative redesign based on findings.
News & Updates
- Mar 2026 Paper presented at IUI '26 (31st ACM IUI) in Paphos, Cyprus: Designing Effective Training Dataset Explanations: The Impact of Information Depth and Progressive Disclosure.
- 2024 Paper accepted and presented at VL/HCC 2024 (IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing): Supporting User Critiques of AI Systems via Training Dataset Explanations.
- May 2021 Paper presented at CHI '21 in Yokohama, Japan: Data-Centric Explanations: Explaining Training Data of Machine Learning Systems to Promote Transparency.
Contact
I am currently on the job market and open to UX research and design roles in industry, as well as research collaborations and academic opportunities. Feel free to reach out.
anikmai@myumanitoba.ca