Bill Gribbons is the Director of Bentley University’s Master of Science in Human Factors in Information Design program. He is also the Founder of the User Experience Center. His research focuses on human factors, localization, behavioral design, design ethics, and UX strategy.

What makes your program unique?

We begin with the building of a deep understanding of perceptual science and human behavior (physiologically, psychologically, sociologically, culturally, and emotionally). Students then master a full array of qualitative and quantitative research methods to complement that foundation. Finally, students move from insights derived in research to design innovation. Our program believes we can improve all that we design through a deep understanding of people. The solution space might be digital, physical, place, service, multi-modal, or the IoT. Given we don’t know what we will face five or ten years from now, we educate problem solvers who can face any problem they confront from a human-centered perspective. Our students also tend to be more experienced and looking to take their UX careers to the next level.

How do you define UX Design?

It’s not one thing — there is a research component, a design component and a strategy component — each of these can be broken out further — qualitative/quantitative, visual design, interaction design, information architecture, multi-modal design and the like. Students choose to specialize in one area or tailor a hybrid program focusing on a combination of these themes. Some students will even add a technical component.

How do you explain the field of Human-Computer Interaction?

Interaction design is one component of the user experience. It begins with a deep understanding of how people perceptually and cognitively interact with the world in a particular use environment. It then requires mapping that understanding to a particular “work” requirement to produce the most effective interaction experience. Success requires the designer to accommodate the strengths and weaknesses of human information processing.

What is your approach to educating students?

This is a performance-based program. While we work from a scientifically based understanding of people, at the end of the day you have to design effective solutions. All of our classes are sponsored by our many corporate partners who bring real problems into the classroom. All of our students leave the program with a comprehensive portfolio of their work.

What trends are you seeing in UX design and Human-computer interaction?

Definitely a move to multi-modal design. While the visual world will always be most critical, with each passing year we see greater demand for haptics, conversational interactions, and the IoT. On the research front, the demand for quantitative skills is also growing. Students increasingly need to understand and appreciate the implications of machine learning and AI on the user experience. Finally, UX designers have to have a keen awareness of the ethical implications of that which they create.

Why is this work important?

Our world is growing increasingly complicated while humans face that complexity with the same capacity, abilities and limitations. It is our job to make technology work for people while demanding less in the interaction. Otherwise we are simply contributing to the problem.

How is this work being integrated with fields like data science, statistics, and communications?

Addressed above. I would add so much of what we did in the past around customization and personalization (both in our research and our design solutions) is now managed automatically through machine learning and AI.

What is the role of design thinking in this work?

We like to call it design innovation, something our field has practiced long before we coined the term “design thinking.” We believe strongly, that while we will continue to make “today’s” product better, we will increasingly devote more of our efforts to shaping “tomorrow’s” products.

What is the role of storytelling in this work?

It’s a natural extension of who we are and what we do. Story telling is but one means of capturing our research and our deep understanding of the people we are designing for. It is a powerful tool richness of the user and use environment, particularly in our ethnographic research.

Are there design or product development frameworks that you subscribe to?

We are neutral on that front, exposing students to a variety of frameworks so they will understand the strengths and weaknesses of each and be prepared for that which they might encounter.

What skills are most important in the development of future UX design professionals?

Many of the issues I described above — — behavioral design, analytics, multi-modal design, AI, machine learning, and ethics.

What is the future of UX design and Human-computer interaction?

It’s definitely a multi-modal world, AR/VR, wearables, implantables, IoT (where the focus is on innovation design since the interaction is often transparent for the user).