Jeff Naftzinger Email & Phone Number

Fairfield, Ct

• Lead end-to-end user research projects on learners and instructors to understand learning gaps, identify opportunities for research, and influence product development for ~$4.5M in educational products per year. • Own and shape roadmap for portfolio of iterative mixed-method projects with 80+ users to create tailored learning content, revise data organization, and foster deep empathy used to increase user engagement with material.• Provide actionable research insights to key stakeholders and cross-functional teams through reports, presentations, and workshops, influencing the delivery of educational materials. • Research complex relationships between learners’ goals, available and emerging technologies, and educational outcomes to explore new ways of incorporating AI into the writing classroom.• Design and facilitate live and virtual Design Thinking workshops to review and validate research projects and digital products, like webpages, teaching materials, and digital communications.• Stay current with the latest research trends and techniques to provide constructive feedback, continually improve institutional UX research practices, and grow experience.

Hartford, Connecticut, United States

• Collaborated with cross-functional team to define, scope, and prioritize user research into digital teaching practices that aligned with institutional objectives and better illustrate what instructors needed to support those practices.• Conducted qualitative research on digital teaching practices to provide designers, product managers, and executives with data-informed strategies for improving and supporting these practices at the university.• Shared research insights with key executives, securing funding to develop communities of practice for instructors, researchers, and students to support their needs.• Led team to create online repository of digital scholarship, driving community engagement and enabling 100+ users to find new opportunities for collaborative research.• Facilitated regular project meetings in an Agile environment utilizing stand-ups, scrums, and 1:1s, increasing efficiency of team members and fostering their development as practitioners.

Tallahassee, Florida, United States

• Planned and conducted evaluative research utilizing secondary research, ethnographic field work, surveys, interviews, observations, journey mapping, and artifact collection with 8 participants to create user personas that could be used to understand how instructors in English department develop their teaching practices.• Partnered with stakeholders in department to develop programs to support digital teaching and design practices influenced by insights gained from user personas.• Leveraged user feedback from 100+ participants to revise mentorship programs and offer workshops on researching and teaching for graduate students/teaching assistants. • Communicated insights from research in 5 presentations and 1 peer-reviewed publication.• Planned and taught 20+ project-based courses for 400+ students in the Editing, Writing, & Media and First Year Writing Programs; revised courses based on user needs and survey responses.

Doctor Of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Rhetoric And Composition

Master'S Degree, Rhetoric And Composition

Bachelor'S Degree, Editing, Writing, And Media