Portfolio

For the Goethe-Institut USA, I evaluated whether a planned chatbot would help prospective students find the right German course. The goal was to clarify, before costly development, whether the target group would accept a chatbot at all.

Finding the right course on the website took a lot of effort, and staff had to call prospective students to assess their language level and availability. A chatbot was meant to take this over, but there were doubts that the target group would accept it. Staff were skeptical too, because prospective students particularly valued personal one-on-one advice. So: validate before building.

14 remote in-depth interviews of 60 minutes each with 8 Goethe-Institut staff members, 3 teachers and 3 learners in the US laid the foundation. They led to a to-be user journey, a concept in Balsamiq and a fully interactive chatbot prototype in Axure RP, embedded in the real website.

The unmoderated UserTesting study covered 8 participants from Germany and Canada: 4 on desktop and 4 on smartphone. After 2 pilot tests, we adjusted the study setup. I analyzed the sessions and edited the most telling scenes into highlight videos for the stakeholders.

For a leading German recycling company, I designed and developed a mobile time-tracking app from scratch: from a blank page to rollout. Employees without access to the core system needed to be able to record their working hours easily and reliably, without media breaks or administrative hurdles.

Because time tracking was being newly introduced, stakeholders feared low acceptance. On top of that, automatic break deductions for missing entries and time zone changes on business trips had to be handled correctly. I aligned the concept with the limits of Power Apps from the start: the mobile app was to act as a bridge to the existing backend.

Several clickable prototypes in Axure RP made alternative navigation and input concepts testable early on. Two rounds of qualitative usability tests served for revision and subsequent validation.

I developed the app in Microsoft Power Apps and built the entire calculation logic for time zones and automatic break adjustments myself. A beta phase with a diary study (6 participants, followed by 4 in-depth interviews) accompanied everyday use. For the rollout, I created PDF guides, explainer videos and a Teams community.

For a leading German automotive group, I designed a central vehicle database replacing a legacy SAP system. The task: to translate an enormous variety of configurations into an efficient, error-tolerant and process-reliable interface.

Countless vehicle-specific parameters caused high cognitive load and cumbersome workflows. The mandated corporate design system was built mainly for consumer applications and brand presentation; components for data-heavy tables, filters and dense input forms were missing.

User interviews, user group profiles and the user requirements derived from them formed the basis for mockups and clickable prototypes in Figma. Together with the central design system team, I evolved components for enterprise use cases and contributed missing B2B patterns back to the system. Usability tests with domain experts helped find and fix obstacles early.

Alignment with the product owners on technical design, ongoing UX acceptance and design critiques of development builds connected design and development. I maintained and versioned UI copy and translations directly in GitHub so the handoff was seamless.

For Eagle Eye Solutions, provider of a platform for digital loyalty programs, I redesigned the interfaces for creating promotions. The result included a design system in Figma that the client can keep working with independently after training.

The key was to reflect how users actually create promotions today and, based on the existing brand style guide, to build a system that would last beyond the project instead of designing single screens.

Contextual interviews were followed by wireframes created with the junior designer and the product owner, tested in a first usability round. The design system was built in Figma: from buttons with all states and form elements such as dropdowns and checkboxes to complex container components.

I reviewed all components through design QA and gave the junior designer feedback on screens, components, Auto Layout and libraries. A second usability round tested the high-fidelity prototype; color contrasts were additionally checked with a color-blind person. Figma training at the client completed the project.