I am a Product Designer and User Experience Engineer for digital products from Munich, Germany, who designs and builds simple-to-use, human-centered, accessible web experiences.
I consider myself an interdisciplinary designer, at the intersection between product, design and development. I am proficient in everything from forming a concept to drafting low- and high-fidelity prototypes and designs to creating and iterating on design systems to crafting semantic, performant and systematic HTML and CSS templates. Through cross-disciplinary collaboration I deliver top-notch long-lasting sites and services that work anywhere, for everyone.
In more than two decades of working with computers and the Internet, I have worked on countless different projects and acquired and refined extensive and in-depth knowledge in various, mostly Internet-related areas. My focus and passion has always been the web, but I have never been afraid to expand my horizons and try new things.
My broad skillset helps me in assessing the complexity of a given assignment, breaking it down into smaller chunks and finding the right people to solve it with. I thrive under pressure by collaborating and communicating with other interdisciplinary team members to successfully achieve the common goal.
I can bring ideas to life quickly by roughing them out on paper, drawing and prototyping them in Figma, Sketch or Photoshop, refining and iterating the designs directly in the code.
I like working in agile managed environments (Kanban, SCRUM, SCRUMbut) in close collaboration with project managers and product owners where I can prioritize my tasks independently. I really hate being micromanaged and agonize about decisions based on opportunism. I have no problem in owning my failures and like to see this attribute in others, too.
Regardless of that, I am allergic to ‘it was ever thus.’ Developer convenience is nice but it should never get a higher importance than the user experience.
Expectations
I am open to focus and role, but I want to help shaping your (digital) product and the overall experience around it with my expertise in product development, designing and coding. Bonus points if your product intends to make the world a better place (climate, sustainability, health, ...). Having had my first experience with a pandemic while leading a team, I want to focus on contributing to a product for the time being. I can imagine flowing into a leadership role again at some point.
I want to collaborate in a creative, open-minded and preferably diverse team with unique experiences and a strong focus on quality and accessibility. Although as a white German male I can’t really add in appearance to this diversity, but I will do my very best to be as welcoming and inclusive as possible myself.
I am open to starting a greenfield project or joining an existing project, working in a company that is just starting up or is already well established.
Working from home (full-time, on individual days or at least flexible working hours) should not be a problem as I would like my wife to pursue her career as a teacher. Plus I want to be there for my kids and see them from time to time.
I am always eager to learn new things—on my own or from others. Hence your company should offer some kind of training budget for attending conferences and proactively promote the exchange of knowledge within the team and the company.
I love skiing and all things wintersport, so it’ll be a major plus if your company holds annual team events on the slopes.
Basically, I like working on interesting problems with good people. If that sounds like you, let’s connect! I’m looking forward to meeting you.
Experience
Having worked professionally full-time in small- and medium-sized teams for the past 18 years I have held many product, design, development and web-related roles across various projects. Depending on the task and project, I worked alone or in pairs with fixed or changing team members.
From greenfield projects to large folders of loosely coupled design files and legacy code bases, from monolithic applications to microservices architecture, from brand new tech stacks to years old code bases, from starting up to maintaining, I’ve worked on all kinds of projects. Along the way I’ve learned when to use proven techniques, frameworks and libraries and when there is room for improvement by building a custom solution. I have also developed strategies to quickly know my way around a given project and can easily adapt to different design styles, languages and coding guidelines.
For three years, I had the privilege of managing and mentoring a (fairly diverse) team of up to five junior and senior designers, spanning a broad spectrum from print and media designers to web designers and UX designers. This was a great experience but also a bit exhausting towards the end due to this thing called pandemic.
Currently I am working remotely at samedi, a HealthTech company, where I am responsible for all aspects of the company’s patient-facing apps and websites. Working closely with the product manager and the development team, my main goal is to create a product that is easy to use and supports patients in managing their hospital stay.
Responsible for the user experience and the user interface design of all patient-facing touchpoints
Responsible for planning, designing, and ensuring quality for samedi’s core product “MyPatientPortal” and its predecessor “samedi Patient” for use in both browsers and mobile applications with particular attention to accessibility according to WCAG 2.2 (Level AA)
Introduced, managed and continuously improved a component library for the white label product “MyPatientPortal”; based on design tokens to easily adapt the design to customer requirements
Audited and revised the web application for booking medical appointments for patients with regard to accessibility
Planned and created prototypes for testing and user interviews
Planned and conducted internal training courses, workshops and lectures on AccessibilityFigma for DevelopersDesign TokensAtomic Design principles and more
In parallel to working as a web designer BörseGo, a FinTech company, gave me the opportunity to lead a talented team of up to 5 members of staff covering a wide range from print and media designer to web designer to UX designer, who were all working in different ventures within the company. One aim of my role was to foster the cross-project collaboration on topics like branding, design systems, functional principles and overall customer experience for every touch point.
Read more about my role
technical and disciplinary leadership responsibility for up to 5 colleagues
personnel development, conducting the feedback conversations, organisational support of the hiring procedure and onboarding of new staff
scheduling and absence management of the department
close collaboration with C-levels and the other departments
initiation and management of department events and off-sites for advanced training, strategic alignment and advancement of cross-project teamwork
Senior Webdesigner
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BörseGo AG, Munich, Germany
My main project from day one at BörseGo has been the GodmodeTrader news website. I have since then executed and was responsible for a major revolutionary redesign (from co-concepting to drafts to mockups to frontend code), a responsive retrofitting and various site wide design iterations to further improve the user experience with the focus on readability, performance and ease of use of the website.
In addition I worked on countless big and small features, landing pages, tweaks and bugfixes as I was the sole designer and frontend developer for this project. Through implementing a lot of best practices for search engine optimization I helped gaining new customers and fostering the metrics.
website for stock market news, stock analysis, instrument information
responsible for branding, usability, design, HTML (started with TWIG HTML, later on vueJS components) and CSS (started with LESS CSS, later on SCSS)
worked as a single designer in a team of 3-6 with PM, Backend JS and Backend PHP
close collaboration with other departments and stakeholders to include their needs and better align the company goals
helped boosting monthly reach from 0.7m uniques, 3.5m visits to 1.3m uniques, 5.5m visits
redesigned and reprogrammed the dated platform from the ground up to be maintainable again (2013–2014)
retrofitted the website to be mobile-friendly and responsive, adding many new features along the way to stay up-to-date with the latest finance news (2015–2016)
iterated and tweaked the website design a few times to among other things enhance readability and overall site performance, which led to faster pages, reduced load times and decreased operating costs
helped porting pages and segments from PHP to vueJS, while switching from LESS to SCSS and from a desktop-first to a mobile-first approach, alongside establishing a new design language (2019–2021)
vetoed against building an AMP site solely for SEO purposes
Project: GodmodePLUS (started as GodmodePRO) (2018 - 2021)
a subscription-based membership service for GodmodeTrader to gain digital access to additional exclusive articles with a headstart
co-concepted possible touch points and user flow on the website
designed logos and created accompanying marketing material
website to receive kickbacks for setting up bank accounts and trading stocks via Guidants
responsible for corporate identity, site design and accompanying e-mail templates, user flows, usability and frontend code of the marketing and account pages
style and appearance should differ to those currently used by BörseGo and its other brands
designed and created branding and logo
designed and implemented web components using Sketch, HTML and SCSS on a custom nodeJS framework
Selection of further projects and efforts
As we were a small team of 3 to 6 designers I also worked on various other projects over time. Those projects covered a wide range of tasks and included crafting and optimizing websites, creating e-mail templates, designing print works, creating assets for interior design and optimizing workflows.
GuidantsTrading — a subsidiary of BörseGo; rebuilt site with focus on semantic HTML, performance, SEO and easy maintainability
MarketVectors — client work; built page templates with HTML & CSS for underlying PHP Laravel code according to client’s drafts
ChartingUI — fully customizable white-label solution to view and analyze stock market charts; designed the interface and built HTML & LESS CSS for components based on a custom nodeJS framework
Article Mailer — reworked HTML e-mail templates to be fully responsive and to work in every mailbox
introduced various process optimizations to reduce manual work when composing PDF publications
During my time at amiando, a SaaS startup to sell tickets for your events, the company grew from 15 to around 100 employees, me being one of only two webdesigners. As I already worked on various other job-related projects while writing my diploma thesis it was a seamless transition from being a graduand to being a full-time employee.
Together with my colleague I was responsible for the corporate identity, the design and the implementation of every touchpoint of the company ranging from the event websites, the event administration area, the marketing website to printed marketing material and trade show stand. Furthermore I was the technical contact for the integration of event pages and the implementation of the TicketShop API on client websites.
Read about the awards we’ve received and the April Fools’ pranks we’ve played
co-responsible for design and implementation of event websites, the event administration area, the marketing website
Over the nine semesters at the University of Applied Sciences Gießen-Friedberg I gained a broad knowledge on many different computer related topics. I was taught design and programming principles, which I used in practice in various labs and university projects. Besides the web technologies I already knew I got experience among other things in FlashActionScriptPHPSQLJavaC++audio editingvideo editing
Personal achievement: Award for Diploma Thesis
Friedrich Dessauer Preis des VDE – Verband der Elektrotechnik Elektronik Informationstechnik e.V.
Read about widgets and how I discovered and implemented solutions to sell tickets for your event on your own website
For my diploma thesis I was tasked to find a possibility to add amiando’s at this time relatively new event ticket shop feature to other websites as easy as possible. This was later on a unique selling point and used widely which helped to expand amiando’s reach and brand awareness, led to more customers (event hosts and ticket buyers), and boosted its SEO score.
Thesis: Widgets — Untersuchung und Implementierung der verschiedenen Integrationsmöglichkeiten von Internetanwendungen
researched and compared ways to include parts and functionality of an event webpage in other websites
built semantic and responsive ticketshop widget to work in iframes and popup windows, fully customizable in width, height, colors and used language
implemented cross-domain communication to automatically resize the iframe to its full content height to not display any scrollbars for a seamless integration into the host’s website
resizing of iframe is based on polling dynamically generated iframes within the ticketshop widget iframe which represent the height of its content in binary
in contrast to other popular cross-domain communication variants the website owner only needs to load one javascript file from amiando’s server, thus making it as easy and fail-proof as possible to implement by providing a small code snippet
additionally to this per-event-add-on the team and I explored and developed a white label plug-in solution to add event administration and the ticketshop widget to Joomla-based websites
although the ready-made plug-in was never widely used by other websites this implementation was a showcase for the ticketshop API, which got deployed by e.g. BMW, mixxt, Nachtagenten, Clubstars and usgang.ch and furthermore led to the implementation as an Google OpenSocial app
adding this feature has helped expanding amiando’s reach significantly and started many cooperations with event agencies
Project Manager Usability Lab
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American Express, Frankfurt, Germany
Read about my responsibilities in this university usability research project
In my sixth semester at FH Gießen-Friedberg I participated in the compulsory course ‘Kreatives Projektmanagement & Usability’ in which our student group worked on a joint project with American Express Germany. We were tasked to undertake a usability lab to get their ‘Corporate Cards’ landing page tested to furthermore identify bottlenecks which led to underwhelming conversion rates.
co-managed the project with a fellow student under the lecturer’s supervision
conducted and evaluated usability tests with several participants from the target group using Techsmith Morae
co-presented the final results after 4 months of intensive research in front of several American Express Germany managers including C-levels
Intern
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Gölz&Schwarz, Munich, Germany
Read about the marketing website and computer based training projects I worked on (and why I didn't pursue working in marketing agencies)
As part of my academic studies I did an internship at Gölz&Schwarz and supported a colleague in the department ‘Kreation’ to work on various joint and individual projects.
The fact that I repeatedly had to neglect work on projects that were only around 75% completed due to running out of budget and/or time (read: marketing release deadlines) made me realize that agency life is not for me.
marketing website to promote the SaaS version of the in-house developed custom CMS
responsible for composing, designing and implementing static website templates, which afterwards got sliced into CMS components by a different team
the aim was to demonstrate the ease-of-use of the product and to generate leads through an always visible contact form
the newly developed branding should resemble the typical Web 2.0 appearance, subtly based on the corporate identity
the code should be free of layout tables and consist of semantic XHTML enforcing the latest strict doctype definition and up-to-date CSS techniques
Adobe PhotoshopEclipseSubversion
Project: Siemens Gigaset Home Planner (finished in September)
interactive Computer Based Training videos for sales staff
responsible for screen recording, cutting and dubbing of the e-learning videos in Techsmith Camtasia according to the existing storyboards
additionally responsible for designing and implementing of a stand-alone running, multilingual Macromedia Flash application based on corporate identity guidelines using ActionScript and Zinc to select and control the videos
Project: VBM EntgeltRahmenAbkommen(finished in September)
interactive presentation and visualization of the latest regional collective agreement on the new classification and remuneration system for the members of the ‘Verband der Bayerischen Metall- und Elektro-Industrie (VBM)’, consisting of around 420 000 employees in over 600 companies
responsible for final drawing of various graphics and charts in Adobe Illustrator
composing and color grading of key visuals Adobe Photoshop
placing and arranging of the content in Macromedia Director according to the storyboard
Having participated in Biology A-levels during school I thought studying Biology would fit perfectly. Which turned out it didn’t because setting up, customizing and maintaining a phpBB bulletin board to connect biology and chemistry students all around Germany was way more interesting.
Intern as Digital Media Designer
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OK Werbung, Friedrichsdorf, Germany
Read about how I got to know agency work
I was co-responsible for the day-to-day routine, being in direct contact with many clients and processing their orders coming through Leonardo. I learned working with Macromedia Freehand and deepened my skills in Adobe Photoshop and Quark Xpress, helping preparing documents for pre-print and Computer-To-Film, which I then manually exposed to cromaline proofs.
Compulsory civilian service
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Pflegeheim ‘Haus Anneli’, Usingen, Germany
Helping the community
Among other things responsible for computing hardware, local network management and front desk.
Read about my first voluntary website project, my courses and US school exchanges
In my last 3 years of school a friend and me worked on our school’s website as volunteers. Back then being represented on this new online thing was not a priority for the school, so we took over a domain, gathered content for the page, redesigned and relaunched it mostly on our own. The reception changed dramatically after we presented the somewhat completed project to the school’s council. Afterwards we even were allowed to run an HTML and CSS workshop for other pupils during a project week.
Specialized Course
Biology
English
School exchange
Noblesville High School, Noblesville, Indiana, USA (March 1999)
Rush Henrietta High School, Rochester, New York, USA (March 1998)
HTML Editor
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Trius AG, Friedrichsdorf, Germany
Dotcom bubble, anyone?!
Getting paid to edit and test HTML templates for a custom intranet tool for employee absenteeism management. And before I even graduated high school, the bubble burst and it all went bust.
Experience through personal projects
I like to tackle sideprojects to get out of my comfort zone, to dip into other directions, to experiment with new techniques and ideas, and to generally learn by doing new things.
Schwarz-Licht — custom-built Wordpress Template for a photographer to showcase her latest photo shoots; example loads from the Internet Archive (2013–2014)
Wordpress Templating
HTML
CSS
SEO
Performance Optimization
Diplomarbeitsucher — my old portfolio site when looking for a company to write my diploma thesis at (2007)
HTML
CSS
several websites for small and medium sized companies, academic studies, school, a contest of the municipality and personal use, flyer, invitation cards, logos, movies (since 1997)
phpBB Templating
HTML
CSS
Adobe Premiere
Adobe Audition
VHS digitizing
Adobe Photoshop 6
QuarkXpress
Macromedia Fireworks
DHTML
PaintShopPro
school politics
Other interests
Swiss army knife by day, tinkerer by night. While most of my hobbies revolve around the digital space and mastering web development in all its facets (did I already mention I am always eager to learn new stuff?!) I enjoy going into the mountains, especially during winter riding downhill and occasionally hiking uphill on various types of boards (currently 7 pairs of ski and 2 snowboards), and playing Basketball.
And when the rest of the family is already asleep I sometimes wrangle with my RaspberryPis (currently 7) and make desperate efforts to keep my smart home and home network running. No, I will not fix your computer but might help you deploy Nextcloud, Pi-Hole and a decent NAS backup strategy to own your data.
taking and editing photos
attending (online) meetups
reading tech blogs and books
not feeling smart when fixing my smart home and its automations
skiing, telemarking, snowboarding
shooting some hoops
building mud kitchens and other stuff made of wood
