Presenters

Michael Miserendino

President, GravityDrive

Michael is a creative and passionate User Experience professional with over 30 years of experience with a human centered approach to designing and developing innovative products. His designs have won awards for their exceptional user experience. The majority of these designs have been websites, software, and mobile products. Other projects include physical products such as tabletop games, simulations, and cockpit instrumentation.

Beginning as a software engineer and user advocate, Michael was instrumental in evangelizing the User Experience approach in several companies before starting GravityDrive. He founded GravityDrive in 2008 to focus on providing user experience solutions for a variety of products and services, quickly building a list of clients from all over the world and in various markets.

Michael volunteers with several organizations, serving on the board of directors of many, often as the UX trusted advisor. He currently serves as a board member with the Indiana Chapter of the User Experience Professionals Association (UXPA), volunteers as an industry advisor and student mentor for advanced research projects with the Human Computer Interaction (HCI) program at Indiana University ‐ Purdue University, Indianapolis since it was started, is a lifetime member of the FBI Indianapolis Citizens Academy Alumni Association, was a volunteer and board member with the Ropkey Armor Museum since his teens helping restore and maintain military vehicles, and is a volunteer first responder with Illiana Search & Rescue.

In his free time, Michael enjoys designing games and helping other game designers, creating artwork in various mediums including studio scale scratch‐built models and 3D modeling, working on cars, off‐road driving, hiking, and hopes to get back into auto racing someday when things slow down.

Henry Dan

I’m Henry Dan. I’m a freelance UI & UX designer working remotely from Indianapolis, IN. For 7+ years I’ve been working directly with startup founders and business leaders to design useful, intuitive, and viable product experiences. I specialize in designing Data-driven and B2B SaaS products, and work on every step of the design process from strategy and wireframing to visual design and developer handoff.

Sarah Nikkhah

I am passionate about researching and designing pleasant experiences with long-term health outcomes. I translate research findings into insights and stories to challenge the status quo and guide design technology. I finished my Ph.D. at the Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering at IUPUI. I worked under 2 NSF-funded studies focused on designing family-centered technology to support family caregivers’ collaboration in cancer care. Currently, I work at Eli Lilly as a UX researcher, but my presentation today includes parts of the learnings from my dissertation at IUPUI.

Andrew Puchle

Designing solutions that not only work from a functionality perspective, but are intuitive to use has become one of my life’s great passions alongside building accessibility into a large organization. Accessibility poses an amazing challenge because accessible solutions are really about designing usable and inclusive solutions. I was introduced to people with disability first in graduate school and then while working for various organizations in Washington DC. Any site that is affiliated with the government is required to be 508 compliant. After I joined Eli Lilly in 2015 as a user experience lead designer, I started advocating for inclusive design and accessibility. I helped to build and champion the Lilly Design System, built on atomic design that incorporates accessibility into all components. I helped to create Access Lilly, an award winning internal program, designed to look at disability inclusion for employees. This grew into forming a digital accessibility team, which I proudly help to lead. 

Matt Lewis

Matt Lewis leads the User Experience team for GE Aerospace’s Commercial Engines and Services business. Previously to this role he served as VP Experience Strategy for WPP’s Rockfish, a top digital agency in the U.S. that served the world’s most forward-thinking companies. When Matt is not trying to save the world with design thinking, he is wrestling with his four young children and volunteering his time with his family parish and schools.

Jeremy Miller

Jeremy is a UX Professional, mentor, and podcast host who strongly believes in the value of soft skills and collaboration. He believes that great software can only be built with great relationships and is committed to promoting the value of soft skills in UX design. Through his podcast, Beyond UX Design, he aims to teach junior UX designers that soft skills alone won’t be what makes them truly effective.

Joel Bancroft-Connors

Back in 2009, Joel Bancroft-Connors was one of the most adamant anti-Agile project managers in the business. After being laid off from his job, he found himself in a colleague’s ScrumMaster certification class and was quickly hooked on the power of Agile. Now, Joel is well-known as ”The Gorilla Coach” for his ability to tackle the toughest challenges and to address the culture and change management problems that other coaches avoid — the 800-pound gorillas.

Marc Macaluso

A strategic minded leader of Product and Design, setting the course for Digital Transformation and Customer Experience solutions across the organization. A capable business visionary, adept at defining and delivering User-centric results with clear financial return on investment. Experience in company-wide partnerships throughout the lifecycle of projects; achieving top line sales, bottom line profitability and process optimization. Market-driven leadership in conducting user research; identifying industry trends to drive product, service, branding and content placement across the portfolio. Technical proficiency in current software solutions, supporting Customer facing access for digital information, eCommerce, service insights and support.