Sarah Alme
Sarah Alme
User Experience Leader and Coach | Ex-Apple, Medtronic & GE Healthcare
Sarah is a User Experience research and design leader working at the intersection of user needs, product strategy and technical feasibility.
Sarah’s passion to understand and design for the user was ignited during her undergraduate studies in Biomedical Engineering at Marquette University over 20 years ago. A critical care bedside monitoring senior design project turned into a full-time role at GE Healthcare where Sarah got to travel the world interviewing doctors and nurses and designed the next-generation monitor. Many aspects of Sarah’s design contributions remain present in the GE Healthcare bedside monitors on the market today. Sarah expanded User Experience research and design expertise while developing life-sustaining implantable stimulators and drug pumps at Medtronic. Her UX design work at GE and Medtronic resulted in 9 patents.
From 2015 to 2020, Sarah led a UX Research team in the Sensing Hardware division at Apple. She grew the team from one lone researcher to a team of 21+ researchers with supporting teams of software, quality and data engineering. The UX Research organization drove specifications for sensor and algorithm performance with their UX insights and generated the AI/ML data for the respective algorithms. The team supported technologies like FaceID, TouchID, ECG & HR, VisionPro and many, many more. Sarah’s description of the team’s contributions: “When the user seamlessly interacted with the product and was not at all aware of the sensor, then the UX Research team had successfully completed the mission.”
When was the last time you thought about interacting with facial recognition and swipe technology when unlocking your iPhone?! These days Sarah enjoys her work contributions quite differently. As founder of Makroz Consulting, Sarah partners with product development teams to define User Experience Strategies and AI technology roadmaps that maximize user benefit and align with organizational goals. Sarah also coaches User Experience contributors along their career paths with a focus on fostering authentic, productive and impactful cultures during a time of great change in Corporate America.
Mindfulness in UX: Creating new Outcomes
The UX landscape is changing as generative AI tools augment our work and the industries we work in shift UX expectations. We get to evolve how we contribute and it starts with mindful awareness of what’s happening within us and around us. In this talk you will learn a handful of tools to build your Creator Consciousness and feel empowered to embrace the change and create new outcomes in your UX communities.