About

Our Team

With backgrounds in design, research, content, and architecture, we’re passionate about all aspects of UX.

Our mission is straightforward:
We partner with IU teams to plan, test, and design great experiences.

Brian Hawkins

Meet Brian Hawkins

Brian oversees IU's digital campus, which is the gateway to our physical campuses; it often sets the stage for someone's first interaction with the university. His teams develop strategies and tools to create better online experiences for IU students, faculty, and staff. Brian also advises leadership on opportunities to improve processes and design better experiences for all users.

Madeline Grdina

Meet Madeline Grdina

Madeline leads the UX Office's efforts to improve software at IU. She oversees experts in research, design, and content strategy. Together, they work with development teams around IU to support and craft experiences that meet users' needs, exceed their expectations, and ultimately lead to successful interactions with IU's digital campus.

On the front lines

A great experience doesn’t happen on its own.
Meet the people who make it happen.

Brian Hawkins

Brian Hawkins

UX Officer and Leader, Digital Campus Design & Infrastructure

Brian oversees IU's digital campus, which is the gateway to our physical campuses; it often sets the stage for someone's first interaction with the university. His teams develop strategies and tools to create better online experiences for IU students, faculty, and staff. Brian also advises leadership on opportunities to improve processes and design better experiences for all users.

Madeline Grdina

Madeline Grdina

Manager of the User Experience Office

Madeline leads the UX Office's efforts to improve software at IU. She oversees experts in research, design, and content strategy. Together, they work with development teams around IU to support and craft experiences that meet users' needs, exceed their expectations, and ultimately lead to successful interactions with IU's digital campus.

Tara Bazler

Tara Bazler

UX Researcher

Tara is a UX Architect with over 16 years of experience. Her background includes UX research, interaction and interface design, as well as management. She is passionate about creating clean, effective designs and simplifying the process for users to accomplish their goals. Outside of work, Tara enjoys relaxing and recharging by hiking, running, kayaking, photography - anything that allows her to explore the great outdoors.

Michael Dalton

Michael Dalton

Content Strategist

As Content Strategist for the UX Office, Michael works with developers and content owners and managers to maintain and present content — data, copy, and concepts — in ways that are clear, efficient, and useful to everyone, helping devise solutions that emphasize single-sourcing, reuse, and minimalism. Michael enjoys travel and getting in way over his head on home improvement projects.

Caitlyn Hymer

Caitlyn Hymer

UX Designer

As a User Experience Designer, Caitlyn analyzes and creates products that provide meaningful and desirable interactions for users. She has a diverse background in multiple forms of creative media including traditional and digital design, photography, fine art and video production. Caitlyn enjoys keeping up with cutting edge technology, exploring the world with her camera, playing video games, and spending time with her family and pets.

Paco Wong

Paco Wong

UX Engineer

Paco is a Marketing and Informatics student at IU. As a UX Engineer, he loves to create and implement designs to solve the day-to-day issues that he sees. Paco looks to improve himself through classes and his work at UXO. In his free time, Paco likes to swim, listen to music, tell stories through photography, and travel.

Meet the Digital Campus Design teams

These teams focus on university-wide digital resources like Rivet and the IU Web Framework, and core properties like iu.edu.

User Experience Office

UXO focuses on software—and works closely with other Digital Campus Design teams—to better UX at IU.

Core Properties

  • Alan Milner
    Core Properties Leader
  • Cody Thompson
    Lead UX/UI Designer
  • Lee Hadley
    Developer
  • Ken Jones
    Developer
  • Josh Lamar
    Developer

Design Systems

  • Levi McGranahan
    Design Systems Leader
  • Rachel O'Connor
    Front-End Developer
  • Zachary Todd
    Developer

Web Standards

  • Allison Chandran
    Web Standards Leader
  • Scott Murray
    Developer
  • Qiwen Zhu
    Developer
Let's be friends.

If you're interested in UX, you're in the right place. Contact us to join the community.

Contact us