Graduate Assistantship:
Research Support for an Unfinished UX Textbook
The actual role
This was a graduate assistantship in Kent State's School of Information from August 2024 through May 2025. My confirmed contribution was helping Cathy Smith research her textbook. The manuscript is unfinished. The page stays with document-level evidence and does not infer adoption, measured outcomes, or a completed study.
The work was document work: gathering and organizing source material, inspecting how UX-program information was structured and written, and shaping an instructional explanation of a practical learning approach. That is useful evidence of synthesis and communication without turning support into authorship.
Artifacts that exist
Book-analysis inventory
A working inventory organized research relevant to the unfinished textbook. It shows source gathering and organization; it is not a published chapter or a claim that the manuscript was completed.
Course-resource and lecture inventory
A structured pass over course resources and lecture material, used to make the available instructional landscape easier to inspect. Internal course material is not reproduced here.
MS UX program web-copy review
A site-map and copy review of the MS UX program website. The artifact records content structure and language questions, not a measured enrollment or conversion result.
Figma-with-AI instructional draft
An instructional draft explains a self-guided approach: use screenshots and an AI tutor to learn inside a real Figma task, while recognizing that results vary. It does not claim measured learning gains for a class.
What this demonstrates
The defensible lesson is modest and valuable: I can gather source material, organize a document system, inspect content for clarity, and explain a technical learning approach. Faculty supervision and the unfinished manuscript set the boundary around that evidence.
This work is part of the larger MS shift from making interfaces first to discovering what is worth making. It strengthened the writing, source-tracing, and revision habits I now bring to research and interaction-design projects.
Boundary note
The page makes no claim of textbook authorship, publication, coding-framework ownership, reliability duties, a completed manuscript, or an institutional outcome. The examples are concise descriptions of permission-safe work, not a wholesale release of internal course or research files.