Boot Camp Faculty and Speakers

Gregg Almquist is the Principal at eXperient Interactive, an interactive and design agency in Boston, MA. eXperient works with a range of companies, from Fortune 500s to start ups, to evaluate and create user experiences for Web sites, applications, and other user-operated devices. Prior to eXperient, Gregg was Director of User Experience at H&R Block, where he founded and built the company?s User Experience Team and successfully integrated user-centered design into the development cycle. Gregg has also worked as a user experience specialist and information architect at leading design consultancies. Gregg is a member of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T), the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM), the Usability Professionals? Association (UPA), and SIGCHI.

Bill Gribbons is Director of the graduate program in Human Factors and Information Design at Bentley University, Waltham, Massachusetts. The Human Factors Program at Bentley is among the largest and most respected program of this type in the country. Dr. Gribbons is the founder of the Design and Usability Center at the University.

Dr. Gribbons received his Ph.D. from the University of Maryland. He is an Associate Fellow of the Society for Technical Communication (STC) and was a member of the Technical Communication Editorial Board. He is also a member of the Association for Educational Communications and Technology, the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society, Usability Professional Association, and the ACM SIGCHI. He is a popular speaker at local and national conferences addressing issues of information design, human factors, and the user experience. His long-term research interests center on the building of a unified theory defining the user experience.

As an expert on the user experience, Dr. Gribbons has been quoted in The Boston Globe, Boston Business Journal, Computerworld, Cox News Service, Mass High Tech, USA Today, the Associated Press, The Washington Post, Investor Daily, East Bay Business Times, ABC 20-20, Business 2.0, a nationally syndicated radio show (A Touch of Grey), U.S.News and World Report, U.S. Business Review, and the Atlanta Journal Constitution.

Bill Hartman is a senior consultant and group leader at Essential Design ? a research, strategy, and development firm in Boston. He is a frequent guest lecturer at Bentley and has a broad background in user-centered design. Bill especially enjoys the translation of user and channel inputs into design requirements, and has a particular interest in participatory design research methods that yield compelling, differentiated solutions for products and interactive systems.

Prior to joining Essential, Bill worked as an independent consultant to a number of clients and industries. His past roles also include Vice President of Product Development at Fitch Worldwide, and Director in the User Experience group at Scient Corporation. Bill has helped organizations develop interactive systems for wide-ranging consumer and B2B applications. Select clients include: Dell, Ford Motor Company, DaimlerChrysler, Toyota Financial Services, Discover Card, State Street Bank, Aetna USHealthcare, Time Warner Cable, Baxter Healthcare, Genzyme, Haemonetics, WrightLine, PatientKeeper, Shure, Altec Lansing, Harvard University, Crown Equipment Corporation, and the AARP. Bill is a graduate of Davidson College (A.B.) and the Institute of Design/Illinois Institute of Technology (M.Des.). 

Meena Kothandaraman has more than 18 years of experience in user experience related tasks that encompass key aspects of the design life cycle: requirements gathering, user research, task analysis, design, prototyping and assessment. Her passion is focusing efforts on good user research ? and modeling the needs of the user with the greatest value to the business. She has effectively applied these techniques to products ranging from software applications design to wireless handheld products. Meena has always promoted the importance of customer experience with relation to key return-on-investment factors. She regularly facilitates design workshops implementing the ?white room? concept for creative problem solving in design. Previously, she managed the customer experience team at Scient Corporation, and worked as a consultant with Human Factors International and Cambridge Technology Partners. She now consults independently in addition to teaching at Bentley. Meena holds a master?s degree in User Centered Behavior and Design from Syracuse University.

 
Expert Panel

 
Evening Speaker

Jeff Takle, Abt Associates