Decision During Drinking (D3 study) is currently developing a mobile app aimed at reducing negative alcohol-related outcomes with a focus on young adults. D3 offers modules to educate users on identifying cues that influence their decisions, understanding their values after drinking, and engaging in practices to avoid such experiences. I have aided in the design of the prototype of the D3 program, both creating new features and adapting previously developed features. The current study assesses core aspects of human centered design on two of the D3 study features I helped to create in Figma. The first is an activity that compares participants’ perception on alcohol expectancies to alcohol’s physiological effects. The second is a “roadmap” planning tool that guides users to create action plans to cope with specific drinking cues, linking each plan to personal values. By using an iterative design approach from research participants’ feedback, I refined the user interface (UI) to improve the features. I am adapting measures on usability (i.e. System Usability Scale) to assess the metrics for these features specifically. Data is being collected from online surveys on the usability of these features. I predict that the final usability score would be higher than the industry-standard threshold (e.g. score of ≥ 70), so the features will provide a seamless and intuitive user interface. Based on the improvements, if deemed usable, these feature designs could be applied to other clinical app developments. 

Alcohol is known to cause a number of cognitive impairments including reduced memory and attention and increased risk-taking decisions. Individuals with anxiety and depression also often have characterizations of cognitive impairments, as do individuals who have high levels of impulsivity. However, less is known on whether cognitive performance is worse while impaired among those with high levels of impulsivity or symptoms of anxiety or depression. This study examines whether individual differences in impulsivity, and anxiety and depressive symptoms (ranging from none to moderate) are associated with cognitive performance on attention, memory, and decision-making tasks during alcohol intoxication. Participants included 30 young adult (aged 21-24) drinkers with recent alcohol-related consequences. As part of a larger study, participants completed a baseline survey that included measures of impulsivity, anxiety, and depression. Participants completed a series of cognitive assessments to measure performance on sustained attention, working memory, and risk-taking decisions after peak blood alcohol concentration (BAC) of ~0.10. Anxiety and depression are linked to distractibility, cognitive fatigue, and difficulty maintaining focus, and therefore I hypothesize moderate symptoms of anxiety and depression will be associated with poorer performance in sustained attention compared to those with no symptoms. Additionally, I predict that higher impulsivity scores will be associated with greater cognitive impairment across all tasks, particularly in decision-making and working memory, as impulsive individuals may struggle more with inhibiting automatic responses. Regression analyses will be used to examine these hypotheses. Since data collection occurred at a single time point, this study serves as a preliminary investigation, and further research using repeated measures across different BAC levels is needed. Findings from this study could lay the groundwork for identifying key predictors of cognitive impairment while drinking, particularly by examining how different psychological and behavioral traits interact with alcohol's effects on cognitive performance.