What type of digital service could add value to the professional life of German farmers? What do they want from the digital documentation of their fieldwork? In this strategic project, I led an innovation process to find out the answer to this question.
Apart from their actual agricultural work, German farmers need to do a lot of work on documenting how their fields are seeded, fertilized, and treated with pesticides. How could they be helped in the best way? What kind of value could a digital service possibly bring to them?
To find this out, I suggested using the Value Proposition Canvas from the consulting firm Strategyzer, an established tool to map customer needs and ideate products and services.
since 2017: ATOMIC SKETCH: UI Pattern Library Template
Client: Designer community
Tasks:
As a contribution to the community of designers, I developed a template for UI pattern libraries with Sketch. The library follows the principles of Brad Frost?s Atomic Design which teaches that every UI is a system of interdependent components, some displaying single functionalities, others being composite elements with more complex purposes. Designers can not only use the Atomic Sketch file to set up a UI pattern library for their products but also create designs from its extensive selection of UI elements. The Sketch template is available under free Creative Commons licence and has been downloaded for more than 15,000 times since its first release.
Technologies:
Sketch
2017-2017: FP SIGN: Signing and Exchanging Documents
Client: Francotyp Postalia
Tasks:
With a very analog business model, German franking machine manufacturer Francotyp Postalia was eager to enter the age of digital products. FP Sign is a digital product that allows users to sign and exchange digital documents, complying with most recent legal and technological standards. During the course of this project a given feature set had to be converted into a user interface that offered an understandable structure and consistant visual language. The main task was to manage a team of two designers as well as keeping the client up-to-date with the state of work.
Technologies:
Daily Standups, Excel, Mail, Power Point, Whiteboard
2016-2016: ITR8 AGENCY: Responsive One-Page MVP
Client: ITR8
Tasks:
ITR8, an agency for digital product development, offers support on resource shortages and innovation projects. The responsive website serves as an MVP to learn more about how to communicate ITR8?s services to their target group and to acquire new project requests. Validated by interviews and testings, the structure and content of this one-page site have been arranged to sections of claim, services, team, methods, job and contact. To minimize the efforts on design and development, every further information on team members and job offers have been sourced out and linked to social media.
Technologies:
Pen & paper, UXpin, HTML5, CSS3, jQuery, Photoshop
2016-2016: DESIGN THINKING: Charity Donation Improvement
Client: SoDi
Tasks:
SoDi is a non-governmental organization that collects donations to support charity and building projects in developing countries. To develop a solution in order to raise the income of donations from people in the age of 30 to 50 years, a Design Thinking workshop was held with the client. A team of 6 members went through the steps of understanding the context of the problem, observing the potential users, redefining the design challenge on a promising, likely solvable aspect, generating ideas, developing conceptual prototypes and quickly testing them with people on the street.
Technologies:
Design Thinking by 6 steps, proto-persona, customer journey, method 365, paper prototyping, hallway testing
2016-2016: DIAGNOSE & FÖRDERN: Learning Evaluation & Support
Client: Cornelsen Schulverlage
Tasks:
Cornelsen Schulverlage is one of the largest publishers of educational literature in Germany. As a part of their product family, ?Diagnose & Fördern? was designed and developed to identify learning weaknesses of secondary school students and support them in improving their performances. Settled in the context of a classroom, the product had to tackle challenges of slow, unreliable or even no wifi access. This was managed by giving the teachers the possibility to have their students tested at home and print out support material as an offline exit point from the interaction flow.
Technologies:
Design Studio, Weekly Standups, Task Board, pen & paper, Sketch, InVision
2015-2015: BRAND SOLUTIONS: Article & Order Management
Client: Zalando
Tasks:
Zalando?s department Brand Solutions cares for brand relations and enables them to manage their articles on Zalando and the incoming orders on their own. Constantly validating user-related assumptions and interface designs in a lean process, an MVP was designed and iterated, containing tested interaction flows and navigations to add articles into the Zalando shop and handle customer orders until their very deliveries. The whole product was designed as a responsive, web-based service, optimized to be easily used on smartphones, tablets and desktop computers.
Technologies:
Proto-personas, Design Studio, pen & paper, Sketch, Axure RP, interaction flows, Value Proposition Canvas
2014-2015: HERE BE DRAGONS: Disruptive Design & Design Thinking
Tasks:
Developing unique products for unmet user needs gives a possibility to bypass highly contested markets. The bachelor thesis ?Here Be Dragons? exactly deals with this subject and merges two methods into a fitting model. Disruptive Design serves to identify an unmet user need, while Design Thinking delivers a resilient solution approach that can further be launched as an MVP. Both methods are productively linked by the Iterative Disruption model.
Technologies:
2014-2015: CASUAL FITNESS: Fitness App for Smartwatches
Tasks:
Following the Iterative Disruption model from ?Here Be Dragons?, a casual fitness app concept was developed for smartwatches. According to the model, several workshops in Disruptive Design and Design Thinking identified an unsolved problem and developed a fitting solution concept. The casual fitness app evaluates body, time, location and weather data by using smartwatch features. Based on this, exercises are suggested to users which easily may be implemented into daily life, always using just the right amount of time.
Technologies:
Disruptive Design, Design Thinking, Survey Monkey, Illustrator, paper wireframes
2014-2014: AUGIT: Augmented Reality Drawing and Creative Networking
Tasks:
The Augmented Reality application ?Augit? enables users to draw and upload three-dimensional images and objects into a virtually enhanced reality. The real world is enriched by the user?s virtual works which can further be coloured, moved and scaled in its environment. After uploading a piece into the ?Augit? network and binding it to a geo-location, users can visit the creative work physically and comment, rate and add it to their favourites. Even the modification of a piece by others is possible and further improves the augmented reality experience.
Technologies:
Personas, Edge Reflow, Axure RP, Photoshop, Illustrator, Keynote
2013-2014: BODYKEY MOBILE: Nutrition & Fitness Coaching
Client: Amway
Tasks:
The task of Amway?s bodykey is to help obese people to reach their desired weight goal easily. To adapt the diet, the digital coach uses the individual prepositions in the user?s metabolism that are determined by a genetic screening. The mobile-optimized version offers the full set of features that was part of the previously launched desktop version. These functionalities enable the user to check his weight development, plan his nutrition and fitness and to favour and collect different types of content.
Technologies:
Daily Standups, Retrospectives, Reviews, Edge Reflow, SCRUM, KANBAN, JIRA, Photoshop, Illustrator, paper prototypes
Job Experience
since 09/2018
SAE Institute
since 06/2018
DCI Digital Career Institute
since 12/2011
Freelance
01/2017-10/2017
USEEDS
07/2015-12/2015
Zalando
10/2013-06/2015
Gruner + Jahr // welldoo
04/2013-09/2015
Gruner + Jahr // welldoo
01/2013-03/2013
Gruner + Jahr // welldoo
12/2010-11/2011
kmf Werbung
MISSION
The world is changing ? and we are on the transition team. This is a phrase from a sticker at my community space. I think it sums up quite well what design has to do nowadays: to make the world a better place for everyone. This is the reason why I strive for the generation of customer value on every project I work on. Every product that follows a true purpose can combine a financially successful business model with a social or cultural impact. To get there, I strongly believe that every important design decision should be based on research and validation. Times are gone when rockstar designers only followed their intuition. Sustainable innovations come from teams who listen and learn about their customers.
PROCESS & METHODS
My experiences in designing services, interactions and aesthetics support companies aiming to enter a market with a new product through a 3-step process just until developing a minimum viable product. The first step service design solves problems relevant to the customer and validates ideas for potential products. Only when customer and business needs are met, a market can be approached successfully. During the interaction design first, digital prototypes are created to test and improve the user experience and usability. By iterating the prototype, the fidelity of the product is enhanced step by step. The aesthetic design creates a consistent and engaging look and feel of the service. Its visual language of the product aims to be as easy-to-learn as possible.
Service Design
Interaction Design
Aesthetic Design
DESIGN MANAGEMENT & LEADERSHIP
Inspiration
Inspiring others means to help them identify with the idea you promote. Having a proper vision of what the company and the design team should ultimately become is one of the best tools to do so. Colleagues that see the purpose in what they work on develop intrinsic motivation for their jobs, becoming happier and more effective.
Intermediary
Leading a design team also means to be the intermediary between designers and other departments or the executive management. This includes forging alliances, setting up collaborations and finding compromises that match to the needs of all stakeholders.
Management
One of the most natural tasks of a leading role is delegating the right jobs to the right people and seeing that projects are completed and the company?s objectives are met. But in order to achieve this, a leader also needs to find and hire great talents with complementary skills who fit into the design team and the corporate culture.
Servantship
A servant leader brings out the best in others, making them grow and minimizing work-related discontent. Also, a dedicated role focussing on design process and team management allows the company to reach its goals earlier and more successfully. When leading a team from within and not from above shows that humility is essential.
Empowerment
Managing a design team does not stop with hiring the right people. It also means to enable them to work efficiently. Therefore, flexible, but resilient tools have to be chosen by the design lead. Also, team members have to be mentored and helped in extending their professional skills in a way that merges their interests and the business goals of the company.
Communication
No relationship can thrive without honest and constructive feedback and trust. Be it in daily work or exceptional conflicts, a lead has to empathize with the team. Problems need to be addressed as early as possible, while achievements should be appreciated and celebrated.
Integrity
A lead should have the commitment and confidence needed to stand for the purpose of the company. Credibility is key when it comes to lead others into a cause. But integrity also asks for taking the difficult decisions and being responsible for them, especially when letting people go who seek new challenges or no longer fit into the team.
Innovation
Innovation is to find better ways of solving users? problems effectively. This seldom comes from a single genius mind, but from a creative culture that follows customer-centric thinking while uniting people with same mindsets and different expertise. It is a design lead?s task to build this frame that fosters innovation.
What type of digital service could add value to the professional life of German farmers? What do they want from the digital documentation of their fieldwork? In this strategic project, I led an innovation process to find out the answer to this question.
Apart from their actual agricultural work, German farmers need to do a lot of work on documenting how their fields are seeded, fertilized, and treated with pesticides. How could they be helped in the best way? What kind of value could a digital service possibly bring to them?
To find this out, I suggested using the Value Proposition Canvas from the consulting firm Strategyzer, an established tool to map customer needs and ideate products and services.
since 2017: ATOMIC SKETCH: UI Pattern Library Template
Client: Designer community
Tasks:
As a contribution to the community of designers, I developed a template for UI pattern libraries with Sketch. The library follows the principles of Brad Frost?s Atomic Design which teaches that every UI is a system of interdependent components, some displaying single functionalities, others being composite elements with more complex purposes. Designers can not only use the Atomic Sketch file to set up a UI pattern library for their products but also create designs from its extensive selection of UI elements. The Sketch template is available under free Creative Commons licence and has been downloaded for more than 15,000 times since its first release.
Technologies:
Sketch
2017-2017: FP SIGN: Signing and Exchanging Documents
Client: Francotyp Postalia
Tasks:
With a very analog business model, German franking machine manufacturer Francotyp Postalia was eager to enter the age of digital products. FP Sign is a digital product that allows users to sign and exchange digital documents, complying with most recent legal and technological standards. During the course of this project a given feature set had to be converted into a user interface that offered an understandable structure and consistant visual language. The main task was to manage a team of two designers as well as keeping the client up-to-date with the state of work.
Technologies:
Daily Standups, Excel, Mail, Power Point, Whiteboard
2016-2016: ITR8 AGENCY: Responsive One-Page MVP
Client: ITR8
Tasks:
ITR8, an agency for digital product development, offers support on resource shortages and innovation projects. The responsive website serves as an MVP to learn more about how to communicate ITR8?s services to their target group and to acquire new project requests. Validated by interviews and testings, the structure and content of this one-page site have been arranged to sections of claim, services, team, methods, job and contact. To minimize the efforts on design and development, every further information on team members and job offers have been sourced out and linked to social media.
Technologies:
Pen & paper, UXpin, HTML5, CSS3, jQuery, Photoshop
2016-2016: DESIGN THINKING: Charity Donation Improvement
Client: SoDi
Tasks:
SoDi is a non-governmental organization that collects donations to support charity and building projects in developing countries. To develop a solution in order to raise the income of donations from people in the age of 30 to 50 years, a Design Thinking workshop was held with the client. A team of 6 members went through the steps of understanding the context of the problem, observing the potential users, redefining the design challenge on a promising, likely solvable aspect, generating ideas, developing conceptual prototypes and quickly testing them with people on the street.
Technologies:
Design Thinking by 6 steps, proto-persona, customer journey, method 365, paper prototyping, hallway testing
2016-2016: DIAGNOSE & FÖRDERN: Learning Evaluation & Support
Client: Cornelsen Schulverlage
Tasks:
Cornelsen Schulverlage is one of the largest publishers of educational literature in Germany. As a part of their product family, ?Diagnose & Fördern? was designed and developed to identify learning weaknesses of secondary school students and support them in improving their performances. Settled in the context of a classroom, the product had to tackle challenges of slow, unreliable or even no wifi access. This was managed by giving the teachers the possibility to have their students tested at home and print out support material as an offline exit point from the interaction flow.
Technologies:
Design Studio, Weekly Standups, Task Board, pen & paper, Sketch, InVision
2015-2015: BRAND SOLUTIONS: Article & Order Management
Client: Zalando
Tasks:
Zalando?s department Brand Solutions cares for brand relations and enables them to manage their articles on Zalando and the incoming orders on their own. Constantly validating user-related assumptions and interface designs in a lean process, an MVP was designed and iterated, containing tested interaction flows and navigations to add articles into the Zalando shop and handle customer orders until their very deliveries. The whole product was designed as a responsive, web-based service, optimized to be easily used on smartphones, tablets and desktop computers.
Technologies:
Proto-personas, Design Studio, pen & paper, Sketch, Axure RP, interaction flows, Value Proposition Canvas
2014-2015: HERE BE DRAGONS: Disruptive Design & Design Thinking
Tasks:
Developing unique products for unmet user needs gives a possibility to bypass highly contested markets. The bachelor thesis ?Here Be Dragons? exactly deals with this subject and merges two methods into a fitting model. Disruptive Design serves to identify an unmet user need, while Design Thinking delivers a resilient solution approach that can further be launched as an MVP. Both methods are productively linked by the Iterative Disruption model.
Technologies:
2014-2015: CASUAL FITNESS: Fitness App for Smartwatches
Tasks:
Following the Iterative Disruption model from ?Here Be Dragons?, a casual fitness app concept was developed for smartwatches. According to the model, several workshops in Disruptive Design and Design Thinking identified an unsolved problem and developed a fitting solution concept. The casual fitness app evaluates body, time, location and weather data by using smartwatch features. Based on this, exercises are suggested to users which easily may be implemented into daily life, always using just the right amount of time.
Technologies:
Disruptive Design, Design Thinking, Survey Monkey, Illustrator, paper wireframes
2014-2014: AUGIT: Augmented Reality Drawing and Creative Networking
Tasks:
The Augmented Reality application ?Augit? enables users to draw and upload three-dimensional images and objects into a virtually enhanced reality. The real world is enriched by the user?s virtual works which can further be coloured, moved and scaled in its environment. After uploading a piece into the ?Augit? network and binding it to a geo-location, users can visit the creative work physically and comment, rate and add it to their favourites. Even the modification of a piece by others is possible and further improves the augmented reality experience.
Technologies:
Personas, Edge Reflow, Axure RP, Photoshop, Illustrator, Keynote
2013-2014: BODYKEY MOBILE: Nutrition & Fitness Coaching
Client: Amway
Tasks:
The task of Amway?s bodykey is to help obese people to reach their desired weight goal easily. To adapt the diet, the digital coach uses the individual prepositions in the user?s metabolism that are determined by a genetic screening. The mobile-optimized version offers the full set of features that was part of the previously launched desktop version. These functionalities enable the user to check his weight development, plan his nutrition and fitness and to favour and collect different types of content.
Technologies:
Daily Standups, Retrospectives, Reviews, Edge Reflow, SCRUM, KANBAN, JIRA, Photoshop, Illustrator, paper prototypes
Job Experience
since 09/2018
SAE Institute
since 06/2018
DCI Digital Career Institute
since 12/2011
Freelance
01/2017-10/2017
USEEDS
07/2015-12/2015
Zalando
10/2013-06/2015
Gruner + Jahr // welldoo
04/2013-09/2015
Gruner + Jahr // welldoo
01/2013-03/2013
Gruner + Jahr // welldoo
12/2010-11/2011
kmf Werbung
MISSION
The world is changing ? and we are on the transition team. This is a phrase from a sticker at my community space. I think it sums up quite well what design has to do nowadays: to make the world a better place for everyone. This is the reason why I strive for the generation of customer value on every project I work on. Every product that follows a true purpose can combine a financially successful business model with a social or cultural impact. To get there, I strongly believe that every important design decision should be based on research and validation. Times are gone when rockstar designers only followed their intuition. Sustainable innovations come from teams who listen and learn about their customers.
PROCESS & METHODS
My experiences in designing services, interactions and aesthetics support companies aiming to enter a market with a new product through a 3-step process just until developing a minimum viable product. The first step service design solves problems relevant to the customer and validates ideas for potential products. Only when customer and business needs are met, a market can be approached successfully. During the interaction design first, digital prototypes are created to test and improve the user experience and usability. By iterating the prototype, the fidelity of the product is enhanced step by step. The aesthetic design creates a consistent and engaging look and feel of the service. Its visual language of the product aims to be as easy-to-learn as possible.
Service Design
Interaction Design
Aesthetic Design
DESIGN MANAGEMENT & LEADERSHIP
Inspiration
Inspiring others means to help them identify with the idea you promote. Having a proper vision of what the company and the design team should ultimately become is one of the best tools to do so. Colleagues that see the purpose in what they work on develop intrinsic motivation for their jobs, becoming happier and more effective.
Intermediary
Leading a design team also means to be the intermediary between designers and other departments or the executive management. This includes forging alliances, setting up collaborations and finding compromises that match to the needs of all stakeholders.
Management
One of the most natural tasks of a leading role is delegating the right jobs to the right people and seeing that projects are completed and the company?s objectives are met. But in order to achieve this, a leader also needs to find and hire great talents with complementary skills who fit into the design team and the corporate culture.
Servantship
A servant leader brings out the best in others, making them grow and minimizing work-related discontent. Also, a dedicated role focussing on design process and team management allows the company to reach its goals earlier and more successfully. When leading a team from within and not from above shows that humility is essential.
Empowerment
Managing a design team does not stop with hiring the right people. It also means to enable them to work efficiently. Therefore, flexible, but resilient tools have to be chosen by the design lead. Also, team members have to be mentored and helped in extending their professional skills in a way that merges their interests and the business goals of the company.
Communication
No relationship can thrive without honest and constructive feedback and trust. Be it in daily work or exceptional conflicts, a lead has to empathize with the team. Problems need to be addressed as early as possible, while achievements should be appreciated and celebrated.
Integrity
A lead should have the commitment and confidence needed to stand for the purpose of the company. Credibility is key when it comes to lead others into a cause. But integrity also asks for taking the difficult decisions and being responsible for them, especially when letting people go who seek new challenges or no longer fit into the team.
Innovation
Innovation is to find better ways of solving users? problems effectively. This seldom comes from a single genius mind, but from a creative culture that follows customer-centric thinking while uniting people with same mindsets and different expertise. It is a design lead?s task to build this frame that fosters innovation.