Putting Farmers First in Digital - Building a UX Department of 25 Designers Establishing Customer-Centric Product Development
Customer: Fendt
Tasks:
- Challenge: AGCO, a global manufacturer of agricultural machinery and home to the premium FENDT brand, lacked a unified digital product vision to effectively address customer needs with digital services. The challenge lay in aligning product teams around a cohesive strategy to deliver a seamless, integrated digital experience across the entire customer lifecycle ? from product discovery to after-sales support.
- Approach: Putting farmers first, I established UX capabilities driving highly customer-centric product discovery and development, integrating user research and testing as core practices. Engaging real users early on, we identified farmers? primary needs and challenges. Collaborative stakeholder workshops helped define and prioritize key digital opportunities, a unified product vision, and a future customer journey with targeted digital touchpoints and services.
- Solution: The unified digital product and journey vision aligned teams around a cohesive strategy, establishing a focused and highly user-centric product development approach across workstreams. As UX Lead, I grew a powerful UX department of 25 designers and researchers within a year, driving efficient development and delivering a seamless, integrated digital experience for customers from product discovery through after-sales support.
AGCO 3D Product Advisor - Guided-Selling 3D Product Configurator for Agricultural MachineryCustomer: Fendt
Tasks:- Challenge: With a wide variety of applications on the field and increasing technical complexity, farmers are facing the challenge of finding the best suitable machinery for their very specific needs. AGCO wants to support farmers identify the perfect product and configuration for their daily tasks, with least effort and without requiring any technical pre-knowledge.
- Approach: For product discovery & development, the UX team conducted interviews with farmers worldwide, involved real customers in co-creation workshops to ideate how to best support farmers when buying agricultural machinery. We evaluated potential solution approaches in focus-groups, created wireframes and visual mockups, iteratively tested prototypes with farmers and refined the solution to best meet the farmers? needs.
- Solution :The award-winning 3D Product Advisor follows a highly user-centric guided-selling approach: Step by step and in a highly interactive way, the farmer is led through the decisionmaking process. By answering a few simple questions on the primary purpose of use, the user can watch the machinery automatically being built and equipped to their specific needs, fully visualized in 3D and ready to order.
Porsche Taycan HMI - In-Car Interaction Concept for First Fully Electric Porsche Sports Car TaycanCustomer: Prosche
Tasks:- Challenge: For their very first fully electric sport car, Porsche faced the challenge to ensure a state-of-the-art in-car experience for digital natives, while at the same time needed to satisfy expectations of longtime regular Porsche customers and heritage car owners. Stated goal was to bring original 911's cleanly styled dashboard from 1963 into the present day.
- Approach: Interviews with longtime Porsche customers as well as digital native prospect customers all over the world led the way for Taycan?s in-car interaction concept: Based on user insights and expectations shared, I took responsibility for concept direction and led development of wireframes and visual mock-ups ? ensuring an intuitive, brand-compliant and fully seamless interaction experience across all six digital displays.
- Solution: Taycan?s in-car HMI (human machine interface) combines clear borrowings from classic Porsche interior design with a state-of-theart digital interaction experience. The number of classic hardware controls has been greatly reduced. Instead, control is intelligent and intuitive ? using voice control, touch and swipe gestures with haptic feedback. All in reminiscence to the original 911 from 1963.
MAN Truck & Bus - UX Direction for Digital Fleet Management Services of Volkswagen GroupCustomer: MAN
Tasks:- Challenge: With the increasing need for digital fleet management solutions, MAN Truck & Bus (Volkswagen Group) created a new Competence Center for Emerging Technologies, aiming to provide value-creating digital transport solutions for its customers. To ensure a fully customer-centric product development approach, dedicated UX & Service Design capabilities needed to be established.
- Approach: As Department Lead UX & Service Design, I took the responsibility for building up and managing a team of 10 UX, UI, Service Designers and User Researchers in Germany and Portugal. Being fully embedded into the project teams, the designers established customercentric product development methodologies and supported the team members in their application.
- Solution: In addition to digital services solutions for fleet management via an industry-leading subscription model (rio.cloud), the teams developed value-creating digital services for diverse target groups all around the vehicle: Amongst others a smartphone app supporting truck drivers with their daily tasks, and a comprehensive truck configurator for customers and sales representatives.
Verivox E-Commerce Portal - UX Direction for Leading Comparison Portal for Household UtilitiesCustomer: Verivox
Tasks:Challenge: A leading comparison portal for household utilities lacking a holistic vision how to ensure a fully seamless digital customer experience across all product verticals and platforms. Naturally grown and newly acquired teams had remained working in silos without a holistic vision of a seamless cross-product user experience.
Approach: As Vice President UX, I led a team of 18 UX and UI designers and user researchers across four product verticals and three locations, collaboratively elaborated a holistic UX strategy and design standards suitable for all teams and established a user-centric and mobilefirst development approach in product development.
Solution: A user-centric, mobile-first development approach ensured a seamless digital experience across all platforms. Unified design standards and a strong UX team aligned product verticals, eliminating silos and enabling a consistent cross-product user experience across desktop, mobile web, and native apps