Robinson, Derek2023-08-302023-08-3020232023-08-30http://hdl.handle.net/1828/15317In April 2016, drug-related overdoses were declared a public health emergency in British Columbia, Canada. At the heart of this public health emergency is fentanyl, a synthetic opioid and the most commonly detected drug in illicit drug toxicity deaths. However, the illicit drug supply as a whole has become increasingly unpredictable, especially since the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted British Columbia’s drug supply, leading to complex drug samples containing benzodiazepines and nitazenes, overdose on which is not reversed by naloxone, the opioid overdose reversal drug as they are not opioids. One harm reduction response to the overdose crisis is drug checking, a process in which a sample of an illicit drug is analyzed to determine its chemical composition. However, access to drug checking is not universal, and the implementation of drug checking services is hindered by several barriers, such as the need for skilled technicians to analyze drug checking data. In this thesis, I describe research I conducted to evaluate a drug checking software platform that facilitates the distributed drug checking model, a model by which drug checking is performed without skilled technicians being geographically present. The research conducted in this thesis comprises two studies: a heuristic evaluation of the software and semi-structured interviews with harm reduction service providers and service users. These two studies lead to three main contributions, which are: (1) a set of usability problems with the software platform and various fixes for them, (2) a set of barriers and facilitators that are associated with the distributed model of drug checking and the software platform, and (3) a set of design considerations for a self-service drug checking kiosk, which is a potential future iteration of the software platform.enAvailable to the World Wide Webdrug checkingoverdosespectroscopyharm reductionfentanylhuman-computer interactionThesis