James Prather, Ph.D.
I care about people and their experience with technology. I've been an award-winning UX teacher and researcher since 2013.
View my ACU Faculty Profile and my Google Scholar page.
Portfolio
Click the cards below to read detailed case studies.
iHeart Media - Sound+ (2022)
Redesigning the live studio experience.
Featuring: interviews, ethnography, and usability testing.
iHeart Media - Campaign Recap (2019)
Helping salespeople provide a better final recap to advertisers.
Featuring: personas, journey maps, service blueprints,
whiteboarding, sketches, and wireframes.
Faithlife - Child Check-In (2018)
Including parents in the spiritual development of their children
while keeping the kids safe.
Featuring: competitive analysis, interviews, experience
flows, flow charts, whiteboarding, lo-fidelity and hi-fidelity mocks.
Experience
Current Positions:
Abilene Christian University (13 Years)
I teach three courses per semester while I am actively involved in serving the university, mentoring students, working on my personal research, and overseeing student research. I started in the Fall of 2013 as an instructor and in the Fall of 2018 I moved up to Assistant Professor after completing my Ph.D. I was promoted to Associate Professor in 2022.
Foresite Cybersecurity (2025 - present)
Working to implement smart and usable automation solutions using generative AI.
Previous Experience:
Subject matter expert on generative AI for the open source Computer Science curriculum by Google.
iHeart Media (5 Years)
I started as a Senior UX Researcher (2 years) and was then asked to lead the team through multiple transitions as Director of UX (2 years). Finally, I stepped back into the research work that I enjoy so much as a Principal UX Researcher (1 year). When people ask why I enjoyed working for iHeart, the answer is simple: the problems were fun to solve and the people are fantastic.
Faithlife
I spent the summer of 2018 as a UX researcher for Faithlife, helping lead problem and solutions discovery, design, and user testing for a brand new product. See the card about "Child Check-in" above to see my portfolio artifacts generated from this job.
Testimonials:"10/10 would hire full time." - Leah Bradford, Faithlife UX Designer
Eastern European Mission
Created beautiful front-end experiences, led users and stakeholders in design discovery sessions, ethnography with missionaries and major donors.
Halff Associates
Developed web and desktop applications to support the work of civil engineers using C, C#, and PHP. Halff is a regional full service engineering firm based in Dallas, TX.
I had previously done quite a bit of research on live shows, but for a different portal that would be used by production directors. I was therefore asked at the outset of this project to go back through old user interviews that I had done and synthesize what we know about live shows into a one-pager for management consumption.
I then began interviewing selected top talent from across the nation in focus groups to get a better understanding of how talent do their jobs, what it's like to run a live radio show, how they use the current software, and what the new cloud-native software needs to be able to do to support their work.
The design sprint was a total of four days: three days in a row, then a week to prototype, and a final day for the finale and validation. Each day we had iHeart's top talent on the call and participating in the design exercises. Buy-in from stakeholders is key in design and this design sprint was perfect for getting it. All of our talent were excited to be helping create the software they would be using in the future.
After just a week on the job, iHeartMedia flew me to New York City for a week to conduct user interviews with business stakeholders. The following week they flew me to San Francisco. Finally, I returned to corporate HQ in San Antonio to conduct more interviews the following week.
I interviewed people at every level of the company from C-level executives to sales support staff, totaling 17 interviews. For the sales staff, these conversations were in pursuit of answering our research questions outlined above. For the executives, the conversations were to understand the vision of where the company was headed, trends in media, and to get some measure of buy-in from the top.
Each interivew was carefully transcribed and the salient highlights pulled out for analysis of trends. After this was completed for all the interivews, I produced first and second order themes so we could establish patterns in the data, understand our users, and move towards a user experience redesign.
The next step was to create a better understanding of how the users currently conduct their work and the visualize the painpoints into a workflow so we could target those weaknesses in any future design work. Whatever app redesign we envisioned, it had to address user needs (personas) and their workflow (journey map and service blueprint).
A service blueprint, like the one to the right, allowed us to see the AE's workflow, but also to see all the interactions they have with internal and external systems, other users, and see where in the behin-the-scenes process a roadblock can occur.
We started with abstract user flows. How should a user move through this redesigned app? What should their experience be? Visualizing this allowed us to minimize complexity while supporting the full experience desired by our account executives that we interviewed.
First, I performed a competitive analysis of what features our competitors were already offering to get a sense of the product space. I collected information from websites and marketing material from the seven most-popular child check-in solutions currently on the market. This was important to answer our first research question above.
Next, I conducted research with 78 children's ministers through telephone interviews and a Google Forms research survey. I wanted to find out what users want, what frustrates them about their current experience, and how they actually use their current software solution. This helped answer research questions two and three.
I took the research data and processed it into themes and patterns so that we could get a "big picture" view of the trends we were seeing from 30,000 feet up. Since I collected data from churches of all sizes - from less than 100 to more than 5,000 members - it was important to show the data in different ways. I broke out the data by church size, by current software solution, and current overall satisfaction level.
Finally, I could answer "what problem are we actually trying to solve?" and "what should our solution be like?" which allowed me to generate a user experience flow for each user type at every point of interaction. This recieved virogous discussion through collaborative comments with the various stakeholders, as well as other members of the UI/UX team.
The first step into design was to translate the user experience flow document into a ux flow chart with each screen being represented and thinking about how one moves from screen to screen in the app.
Each user test was transcribed with speech from each person color coded and positioned opposite of a screenshot of what the user was looking at when they made the comment. After transcription was completed, I made thorough notes that highlighted the most important and salient discoveries from that session.
Education
Ph.D. in Computer Science
Master of Arts in Old Testament
Master of Divinity
Master of Science in Applied Cognition and Neuroscience
Bachelor of Science in Computer Science
Peer Reviewed Articles & Research
I conduct research on a variety of topics. As a human-computer interaction researcher, I'm interested in how humans use technology, which can take place in many different contexts. Right now I'm working on novice programmer interaction with large language models, metacognition in novice programmers, human factors and design of programming error messages, and usable privacy and security. I am also the sponsor and research mentor for the SIGCHI Local Chapter at ACU, which conducts research that I oversee.
My Research
James Prather
Data from Google Scholar · last updated (UTC): 2026-01-30T19:15:52+00:00
Citations
h-index
i10-index
Top publications
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The Robots are Coming: Exploring the Implications of OpenAI Codex on Introductory Programming
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Programming Is Hard–Or at Least It Used to Be: Educational Opportunities And Challenges of AI Code Generation
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The robots are here: Navigating the generative ai revolution in computing education
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Computing Education in the Era of Generative AI
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"It's Weird That it Knows What I Want": Usability and Interactions with Copilot for Novice Programmers
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Compiler error messages considered unhelpful: The landscape of text-based programming error message research
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Using Large Language Models to Enhance Programming Error Messages
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My AI Wants to Know If This Will Be on the Exam: Testing OpenAI’s Codex on CS2 Programming Exercises
Student Research from My Lab
The following papers were written by undergraduate students that I mentored or from the SIGCHI local chapter that I sponsor.
Austin Lee Geisert, Chase Yamaguchi, Aidan J Boisvert, Terrence Naldoza, Brendan Gipson, Grant Wininger, Stephanie Heras, Sidney Kwame Osae-Asante, Musa Blake, Gweneth Barbre, Devin Salehi, Nicolas Pena, Mya Hargrave
Extended Abstracts of the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '25)
Peer-reviewed publication with 28% acceptance rate
Bailey Kimmel, Austin Geisert, Lily Yaro, Brendan Gipson, Taylor Hotchkiss, Sidney Osae-Asante, Hunter Vaught, Grant Wininger, Chase Yamaguchi
Extended Abstracts of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '24)
Peer-reviewed publication with 38% acceptance rate
Davis Arnold, Benjamin Blackmon, Brendan Gipson, Anthony Moncivais, Garrett Powell, Megan Skeen, Michael Thorson, Nathan Wade
Extended Abstracts of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '22)
Peer-reviewed publication with 50% acceptance rate
- 3rd Place Student Research Competition
Adam Garcia, Garrett Powell, Davis Arnold, Luis Ibarra, Matthew Pietrucha, Michael Thorson, Abigail Verhelle, Nathan Wade, Samantha Webb
Extended Abstracts of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '21)
Peer-reviewed publication with 50% acceptance rate
John Marsden, Zachary Albrecht, Paula Berggren, Jessica Halbert, Kyle Lemons, Anthony Moncivais, Matthew Thompson
Extended Abstracts of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '20)
Peer-reviewed publication with 29% acceptance rate
John Marsden
Proceedings of the 51st ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE '20)
Peer-reviewed publication
Collin Blanchard, Holly Buff, Travis Cook, Raquel Dottle, Gideon Luck, Alani Peters, Virginia Pettit, Isaak Ramirez, and Jessica Wininger
Extended Abstracts of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '18)
Peer-reviewed publication with 50% acceptance rate
Kayla Holcomb McMurry, Nevan Simone
Proceedings of the 47th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE '16)
Peer-reviewed publication
- 1st Place Student Research Competition
Monographs
Jeff W. Childers and James Prather
Gorgias Press, Piscataway, NJ
Invited monograph
Interests
I'm a husband and father of four kids, so when I'm not at work, I'm usually hanging out with my family, going on adventures with them, or travelling. I love travelling. I've travelled internationally to attend conferences and present research. I'm also a committed Christian who believes in living the words of Jesus ("love your neighbor as yourself"), the words of the prophets ("do not oppress the widow, the orphan, the alien, or the poor"), and the words of Paul ("do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves"). I think Christianity calls for inclusion and Jesus models that behavior. I enjoy a good theological discussion. I also enjoy combining my two interests, Computer Science and religion, into work in Digital Humanities.
In the rare moment that I have downtime, I enjoy playing video games with my students, playing Factorio with my son, playing D&D with friends or being the DM for my kids and their friends, reading a good fantasy/steampunk/sci-fi novel, or writing my own novel (yeah, everyone is writing a novel).
Awards
Grants:
- Google AIR Grant: $60,000
- Google GARA Grant: $100,000
Research:
- Best Paper Award, SIGCSE, 2023 (link)
- Best Paper Award, ACE, 2023 (link)
- Best Paper Award, ACE, 2022 (link)
- Best Paper Award, ICER, 2020 (link)
- Best Paper Finalist, ITiCSE, 2020 (link)
- Best Paper Award, SIGCSE, 2019 (link)
University:
- Dean's Award for Research, College of Business Administration & Technology, 2023
- Outstanding Junior Faculty (Weathers Fellowship), College of Business Administration & Technology, 2021
- Teacher of the Year, School of Information Technology and Computing, 2020
- Undergraduate Research Mentor of the Year (STEM), ACU Office of Research and Sponsored Programs, 2018
- Teacher of the Year, School of Information Technology and Computing, 2017
- Teacher of the Year, School of Information Technology and Computing, 2015
- Exceptional Leadership and Dedication Award, 2013
A superb educator
Damn fine researcher
-Josh M., Sr. UX Designer @ iHeartMedia