I teach graduate courses at the School of Information at Pratt Institute in the areas of data analytics, digital strategy and user research and evaluation.
As part of the UX courses students work with culture organizations. These client-based course projects offer students practical experience applying UX skills while also helping our community partners better understand their users’ needs and make their digital products more user-friendly. If you need help with a digital project contact us at the Center for Digital Experiences at Pratt Institute.
INFO 683 Museum Digital Strategy: Planning and Management
Museums are developing and implementing digital strategies to embed the use of technology across their different functions with the end goal of engaging with their audiences in the digital arena. This course aims to provide an understanding of the management and planning concepts, frameworks and tools needed in the implementation of a digital strategy. Students engage in hands-on exercises to learn how to define, execute and evaluate a digital strategy. This course examines how to integrate digital platforms such as website, mobile technologies and social media into the strategic plan and tactics of the museum with the aim of reaching audiences, increasing engagement with the online communities and improving the visitor experience. It includes a review of some of the digital strategy documents published by various museums and an online analysis of their digital outcomes. From an internal organizational perspective, the course explores how specific museums have incorporated digital plans to transform their culture, processes and increase their digital literacy. Discussions during the course will deepen into the opportunities and challenges of implementing digital practices in a museum.
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INFO 644 Usability: Theory and Practice
This course provides the theoretical and practical foundations for evaluating digital interfaces from a user-centered perspective. Through lectures, in-class activities, readings and individual and group assignments, students will learn and apply usability principles and gain hands-on experience with several common usability evaluation methods, including traditional user testing plus inspection- and field-based methods. Because the goal of evaluation is always to improve the underlying usability of an interface, the course will focus on effectively communicating evaluation results. At the conclusion of this course, students will possess the knowledge and skills necessary for successfully planning, conducting, and leading usability evaluations across a diverse array of organizations and industries.
INFO 685 Digital Analytics: Web, Mobile & Social Media
Cultural institutions embrace digital media and use it as a means to communicate and promote their activities, and also to interact and engage with their audiences. Digital Analytics can help to understand the users and their behaviors on the organization’s website, social media and mobile apps. This course is intended to provide an insight on the digital analytics process and present the steps to define and select metrics that support organizational strategic goals and measure digital success. This course teaches how to use some of the most significant digital analytics tools such as Google Analytics, Facebook Insights or Twitter Analytics. Students will develop skills in the use of these tools, including advanced settings, user segmentation, content testing, report automation and dashboard creation.
The course covers the entire process, from how to collect data from different platforms to analyze and visualize the data. There is an important practical component where students conduct exercises on how to extract and interpret data to make changes to a website, app or social media activity. Examples are presented to illustrate how to use the different analytics reports in order to provide insights, inform strategy and provide evidence to help the decision making process.
INFO697 Advanced Usability and UX evaluation
This course covers advanced concepts, techniques and tools to conduct usability research and user experience evaluation. Through lectures, in-class activities, readings and individual and group assignments, students will gain hands-on experience with several common usability advanced evaluation methods, including eye tracking, digital analytics, heatmaps, A/B and multivariable testing and usability benchmarking studies. Students will develop skills in the usage of these tools working with real data and running their own studies in the Usability Lab. The course will have a strong focus on the communication of user research and evaluation results and a range of reporting methods will be explored and practiced during the course.