I study how people trust, misread, and collaborate with AI systems.
And I design and ship products grounded in that evidence.
I'm Maren Lian, a UX researcher and product designer working on human-AI interaction. At the University of Toronto's COoKIE Lab, I study sycophancy in conversational AI — how systems flatter, mirror, and align with users, and what that does to trust. As a UX Researcher with the Government of Ontario, I bring research rigor to reporting and services used across the province. I also build: my most recent product, ClearTerms, is a live AI tool that annotates financial agreements in place.
Selected work
5 entries- 01
Independent service design study
Shelter Access Blueprint
Mapped Toronto shelter access as an end-to-end service, revealing how failed handoffs, partial capacity data, and morning exits can restart the same urgent journey.
Read the study → - 02
Client capstone · Research lead
CarbonTrace
Led research design for a counterbalanced, within-subjects usability evaluation (N=6) that informed which prototype direction the client carried forward.
Read the study → - 03
Government of Ontario · Shipped internally
Power BI Design System
Turned recurring friction in everyday dashboard work into accessible Power BI foundations, reusable components, page templates, and a shared QA checkpoint.
Read the study → - 04
Independent evaluative study
First-Time Banking Study
An independent moderated evaluation of BMO’s public banking site that traced first-time visitors’ uncertainty from missed comparison tools to a buried mortgage result.
Read the study → - 05
Shipped · Solo build
ClearTerms
An AI annotation tool that helps people understand financial agreements without leaving the document. Designed, built, and shipped on the principle “annotate, don’t translate.”
Read the study →
At the COoKIE Lab I study how conversational AI flatters, mirrors, and aligns with its users — and what that does to trust.
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