Senior Product Designer at Blinkist/Go1
I'm a Senior Product Designer who shines when I can bring a mix of empathy, applied cognitive psychology, delight and resilience to my projects.
I'm based in Berlin.
BERLIN, GERMANY • NOVEMBER 20, 2024
What led you into design?
As a kid I always loved to explore and inherited a creative spark from my family. Early on I got the chance to draw on paper, sculpt with clay and stone, do my first stitches on a sewing machine and fell in love with creating things in real life and digitally. Gladly, that never changed.
From 2008—2013 I studied communication design at Burg Giebichenstein in Halle, Germany, which was heavily influenced by Bauhaus university.
After I got my degree in communication design I started out as a graphic designer, where I worked mostly in digital and occasionally in print at DaWanda, an e-commerce company that's part of Etsy now. After 3 years inside the in-house marketing team and some freelance work on the side, I had the chance to switch to the product team in 2016. I was really interested in cognitive psychology and wanted to shape the platform, so I welcomed that opportunity. On the job I learned how to talk to users, test concepts and craft beautiful products. I do that for 8 years now and gained a lot of experience in web and mobile.
How does your typical work day look like?
I usually go out for a 30-min walk to start the day, which leads me to open my Macbook at 9:00 AM. I tend to work in my home office as my company allows for that and go to the office once a week to see my colleagues in real-life, plus enjoy the food in our office-cantina. The day starts with checking messages and replying to anything urgent. I'm in part of one of our 3 cross-functional mobile app teams. At 9:45 we've got our daily team checkin via Zoom where we update each other on our plans for the day and understand whether anybody needs support. That really helps to structure the work ahead and prioritise the right things.
The rest of the day is a mix of project meetings, 1:1s, co-design sessions, user test interviews and focus time on my own.
What's your workstation setup?
I work with a Macbook Pro 16'. My Sony Noise cancelling earphones are always close-by to help me get into the zone. I also have an external screen but only plug it in occasionally. I used to work on the web for several years, where I favoured big screens, but now I'm in a mobile team and don't need the biggy anymore. Next to laptop & co I work with my iPhone 13 and Pixel 5 to check how work-in-progress designs look and feel like on the devices. On purpose I don't have the latest devices with me because I want my work to be inclusive for older phones as well. In the office we have new and old devices available, so I often get the chance to check my designs on different ones.
To be honest I tidied up the desk for you, on a day-to-day basis it's way messier. I need some creative chaos around me to be productive. There are a lot of designers with very clean tables, but well, that's not me.
Where do you get inspired?
That would be nature for sure. I love to go to the forests, clear my mind and make space for new ideas. Last year I went to Sweden for a month and still recall the magic of the woods there.
Skating on a longboard has the same effect on me as nature has. When you have to focus on performing different steps on a rolling board, you can't overthink your projects, but need to focus on staying on board. It really helps to reset and open my mind. Apart form that I walk around with open eyes, always soaking in what I see.
Which products you've seen recently have a great design?
I like to use the Arc browser to not get lost in search results but directly get something tangible. The idea to combine different search results and create a landing page including the important infos right away is a real time saver. I enjoy how easy and pleasant using the Arc browser is.
Which projects are you proudest of?
No. 1 – Shorts:
In early Summer 2024 we started to explore ideas that go beyond our known and loved Blinks, which let you grasp the key insights from non-fiction books in ~15mins. One of the user pain points we discovered, was the difficulty to quickly find the title to listen to and get going without thinking much about it. Blinkist isn't like e.g. Duolingo, where your clear next step is to do a new language lesson. At Blinkist you could continue a title you started already, or you find a new one, but it always requires some thought. So me, my cross-functional team (PM, Devs, QA, Data) and some of our Content folks came together to explore other possibilities. We came up with micro learnings you can quickly consume and feel accomplished. We wanted these to be fun and engaging, but at the same time they should be more visual than anything we had before (Blinkist is an audio-first app after all) with the aim to increase weekly active users as our main metric. It took us several iterations, user interviews, 2 beta tests and 1 bigger AB test to get it right. That being said: We got A LOT of encouraging user feedback since the beginning, which is super cool, and we have a lot of ideas to reach our KPIs. In the future, Shorts will be included in every part of the Blinkist experience.
I worked on the concept and screen flows, collaborated on the branding and micro interactions + animations with our brand designers and worked in ping-pong on all the implementation details with my team's iOS and Android engineers. The feature is available in English only right now.
I can tell you more about it all in person. Here are some impressions of how Shorts look like now, and below are some of the earlier drafts and test versions.
Earlier versions:
No. 2 – Blinkist B2B platform:
Blinkist had a skeleton of a B2B product for the longest time and I had the chance to be part of the team who built a platform we could sell to big companies. In 2022 I worked in a small 3-people team with my dear colleagues Monique Pattison as Product Manager and Hugh Brace as Engineer. With product-led growth in mind we updated Blinkist's web app to be way more on par with the mobile app, plus added some extras focussed on our B2B customers, whom we interviewed upfront and through out to make sure we built the right features. It was a tiny team and we had a lot of freedom which enabled us to work super quickly and flexibly. I'm very proud we were able to add a lot of features to the web app (that prior were only available on the mobile app) and build an admin view for Learning & Development Managers who curate content for their teams inside our B2B product.
Which companies did you work for?
I mainly worked in-house and had some freelance clients in the past.
The in-house companies are:
Blinkist/Go1
Educational app
B2B + B2C
Malt Strategy
Consultants marketplace
B2B + B2C
DaWanda
E-commerce
B2C
What do you do in your free time?
In 2018 I started longboard dancing for which I love to go to Tempelhof airfield, an old airport in Berlin. The area where planes used to take off and land is very wide and ideal for skating. The sport of longboard dancing is a creative mix of performing different dancing steps on the board while keeping your balance, and it has a lovely community. I also support Longboard Girls Crew which is a non-profit organisation aiming to help girls and women who want to learn longboard dancing.