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.
Click the cards below to read detailed case studies.
iHeart Media - Sound+ (2020)
Redesigning the live studio experience.
iHeart Media - Campaign Recap (2019)
Helping account executives provide a better final recap to advertisers.
Faithlife - Child Check-In (2018)
Including parents in the spiritual development of their children
while keeping the kids safe.
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.
Setting vision and guiding product design for the programming and play out platform, which includes five different products across the radio spectrum. These products include live radio play out control, leveraging AI to assist hosts and programming, station management, and more. As a principal, I have been tasked with leading stakeholders, developers, and other designers in early discussions around new product creation and seeing it to completion. This involves both setting a product vision ("it should look like this and do that") as well as leading efforts to create an MVP ("but we should start here"). I also manage multiple designers working on these different products, meet with them regularly to provide feedback, and represent the UX team with high-level stakeholders to ensure alignment.
I work full-time during summers and part-time during the school year. I perform user interviews, observations, qualitative and quantitative data analaysis. I create personas, journey maps, user flows, and wireframes. I have also led a project and directed the work of a junior UX designer. Check out the portfolio examples above for examples of my work.
Testimonials:"Thanks for spending time with us at iHeart, you really made a difference." - Steve Mills, Global CIO, iHeartMedia
"Thanks for the great UX sessions. I really enjoyed them. And love all the good examples." - Laura Osorio, Senior UX Designer, iHeartMedia
After the departure of our previous director, I served in that role for until a permanant replacement could be found. In this role, I managed the UX team, held weekly meetings with various product teams, advocated for a cohesive vision across the ecosystem, hired new designers, and shepherded an intern. I also continued doing some UX research on designing the live radio show experience in the web browser.
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
Created beautiful front-end experiences, led users and stakeholders in design discovery sessions, ethnography with missionaries and major donors.
Developed web and desktop applications to support the work of civil engineers using C, C#, and PHP.
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.
The following papers were written by undergraduate students that I mentored or from the SIGCHI local chapter that I sponsor.
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. My wife and I were study abroad sponsors to Oxford during the summer of 2017 (I kept a daily travel blog if you'd like to see what that was like). 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 and am part of a three-year grant project to perform data analysis on ancient Ethiopic manuscripts of the Old Testament.
In the rare moment that I have downtime, I enjoy playing video games with my students (mostly Blizzard's Overwatch), playing D&D with friends, reading a good fantasy/steampunk/sci-fi novel, or writing my own novel (yeah, everyone is writing a novel).