After providing technical support for hard-to-use systems for a number of years, Dan Berlin discovered the world of user experience (UX) when he sat as a participant in a usability study. That’s when he quit his job and went full-time to Bentley University to earn an MBA and an MS in Human Factors in Information Design. During his 13+ year UX career, Dan has lived the agency life and spent 10 of those years building the research team and practice at Mad*Pow, an experience design agency in New England. He recently started Watch City Research, a UX research consultancy in Waltham, where he focuses on usability research in different product domains. He served on the UXPA Boston Board of Directors for eight years and served as the submission chairperson for their annual conference from 2012 to 2021. Dan is the editor of “97 Things Every UX Practitioner Should Know,” a book of UX essays from 97 different authors. He’s also on the Board of Directors for the Waltham Land Trust and can often be found kayaking along the Charles River or hiking with his dog, Shadow.
William Gribbons, PhD, is the academic director of the Information Design certificate program. He is also the director of the Human Factors in Information Design program at Bentley University. Gribbons was the driving force behind the Design and Usability Center, where he serves as senior consultant. He is a past President of the Boston Chapter of the Society for Technical Communication (STC), an associate fellow in the STC, and a member of the Technical Communication editorial board. Gribbons received his PhD in education and visual communication from the University of Maryland.
Bill Hartman, leads Essential’s efforts in product and service discovery and definition, mapping strategy opportunities and driving development agendas. He is an expert in the translation of user and channel inputs into design requirements to best support business goals. Prior to Essential Design, now part of UK-based PA Consulting, Bill worked as an independent consultant to clients in a number of industries. His past roles also include VP of Product Development at Fitch Worldwide, and Director in the User Experience group at Scient/Razorfish. He is a graduate of Davidson College (A.B.) and the Institute of Design/Illinois Institute of Technology (M.Des.).
Sarah Johnson is an Assoc. Sr. Manager of Content Strategy at CVS and teaches content strategy at the Bentley University User Experience Center. She has twenty-five years experience at companies such as CVS, TIAA, Fidelity Investments, and Bank of America. She works with content teams to grow both leadership and UX skills. She has run content strategy summits within her UX teams and spear-headed a workshop, The Art of the Difficult Conversation, which she developed in conjunction with Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute. The workshop went on to be offered corporate-wide at TIAA. She’s a graduate of the InnerMBA offered by SoundsTrue, LinkedIn, and NYU.
Demetrios Karis has been researching, designing, and evaluating consumer products and services for over 25 years at Verizon Wireless, Verizon Telecom, GTE, Grumman Aircraft Systems, and the University of Illinois. He helped design GTE Airfone and several speech-based systems, and then for ten years led the SuperPages.com user interface group at GTE Labs, where he established a program for developing a comprehensive understanding of the user experience. Demetrios also worked on the Verizon broadband customer experience, from DSL installation to the use of value-added services such as online backup and sharing and gaming. Demetrios established and led the User Experience team at the Verizon Wireless LTE Innovation Center, and also worked on smartphone user experience, mobile phone applications and accessibility. He has published dozens of articles in diverse areas, including autobiographical memory, cognitive psychophysiology, automation using speech recognition, human factors, and usability evaluation methodologies. Demetrios received a B.A. in Psychology from Swarthmore College, a PhD in experimental psychology from Cornell University, and an NIMH postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Illinois. He is now an independent consultant and for the last several years has been doing volunteer UX research for the MA Trial Court. Every fall in his Field Methods course he now supervises student projects with the Trial Court.
James discovered the profession of UX after a series of chance encounters with a disgruntled architect, an Olympic ski coach, and an automotive designer led to an introduction to the first human factors engineer hired by Bose Corporation over 26 years ago.
James instantly fell in love with a profession he had never heard of. Despite having just graduated an expensive engineering school, he took a job paying high school wages so he could pursue his dream job.
He started out by prototyping and co-designing the world's first handheld touchscreen stereo interface (essentially Sonos on an iPhone a decade before the iPhone existed), and returned to school to become one of the first students in the Bentley University HFID program.
Over the past 26 years, James has built and led UX teams for companies across diverse industries ranging in size from startups to Fortune 5, gravitating to design leadership and systems thinking roles.
James began teaching as a favor for a fellow HFID alum who wasn't able to teach his own class. That was over a decade ago; James had so much fun teaching he never stopped. His classes blend understanding the underlying principles of design with navigating the real world challenges and politics you can't learn from a book.
Jen McGinn is a Senior Director of Product Design at VMware, where she leads a global team of UX professionals. She's been leading teams, designing, and conducting user research activities since 2003 at Sun Microsystems, Nokia, Oracle, CA Technologies, and Veracode. Jen presents regularly at regional and international UX conferences, and has co-led the group mentoring activities at the Boston UXPA conference since 2012. She has published and presented on a variety of topics, such as persona development, presenting research results, conducting heuristic evaluation, focus groups, severity rating scales, interactive journey maps, UX strategy, and how to incorporate user research into Agile development environments. Jen holds a BS in Information Systems from UMBC and a MS in Human Factors from Bentley University.
Darrell is a mixed methods UX Researcher at Google, where he leads research on behalf of the company's employee-equipment operations and services teams. Darrell is also an adjunct professor in the HFID program at Bentley.
Darrell holds a PhD in Psychology from Northeastern University, where he designed and conducted experiments to investigate human language processing. He has been a speaker and invited guest at several universities and UX conferences. He is passionate about teaching research-related topics, particularly to students who don't have a background in methodologies and statistics.
Minmin Yang is currently working as Head of UX, Migration Services, at AWS. She leads a team of UX design and research, working on 10+ products and initiatives. She has 15+ years of hands-on experience in both design and research including creating vision designs, prototyping at all fidelity levels, and delivering design specs for scrum teams, creating data visualization, conducting customer research by interviews and focus groups, creating personas and journey maps, and run usability tests and surveys. Before AWS, she also worked at Verizon, Autodesk, and Constant Contact. Minmin received her Ph.D. in Human-Computer Interaction at Rice University.