Wyatt Michel

My take is that complexity usually deserves clarity, not simplification. The people I design for are backup administrators, solution architects, and infrastructure teams managing workloads across highly regulated industries. They need depth and control. My job is to give that depth the right structure: the hierarchy, the defaults, the scaffolding, so both expert and novice users can move fast without getting lost.

What I'm most proud of professionally is when design changes what gets built, not just how it looks. That kind of influence rarely comes from the Figma file alone. It comes from first-hand research that uncovers the right problems, facilitation that gets the right people in the room, and advocacy that makes user evidence impossible to ignore. I've been able to do just that with Backup and Recovery.

Design as advocacy

The clearest example: during Backup & Recovery's development, the initial architecture required customers to provision and maintain a SaaS Connector. That's additional infrastructure tacked onto a product that was supposed to be fully managed. It contradicted the entire value proposition.

I ran 9 sponsor-user engagements with enterprises including BNPP (Paris), American Airlines, and QAD. The feedback was direct. From the BNPP workshop during Backup & Recovery:

"

We do not want to manage another piece of infrastructure for a managed service.

That sentiment came up across three separate QAD sessions too. I compiled 11 themes and 43 key insights, then presented the findings across IBM and our vendor. 233 stakeholders total. The architecture changed. The SaaS Connector was replaced with a Gateway Agent that installs directly on customer workloads, no extra infrastructure required. Setup complexity dropped by 50%.

The path

I started at SCAD, where my team built 222 Solutions, a far-UVC sanitization system for rideshare drivers that won the 2021 Indigo Design Award (Gold). That project taught me that great design means understanding why something matters before deciding how it should work.

At IBM, I led UX on Databunker (the greenfield vision that defined the platform) and Backup & Recovery (end-to-end execution to GA across 5 global regions), a product projected at $11M in first-year revenue. I facilitated workshops across IBM and our vendor and ran research with Fortune 500 clients. The work influenced the roadmap in ways that show up in the shipped product, not just the design file.

Outside of IBM, I mentor student design teams. One of those teams took 1st place at the 2025 Student Service Design Challenge. I'm looking for the next product that deserves this kind of work.