#hands-on-no-ego-mentality
Who is Daniel?
Daniel is a Product Design Lead, who works with multidisciplinary teams on many parts of an experience — from defining what product is built to shipping the final product to its target group.
Daniel's background
Connecting hardware and software – Daniel has a product design background. He studied Industrial Design with the strong focus on the connection between well crafted physical products (hardware) and the suitable interface (software). Since this time he likes to shape ideas to real products, that combine these two worlds.
Shaping content and the user experience – Daniel fell in love with Interaction Design since his Master Studies with a lot of inspiring people. Working in multidisciplinary teams he loves being in the middle of the Visual Designer, the User Experience Designer and the Developers, crafting digital products and services that are beautiful, accessible, and full of daily challenges. As often as he can, he writes markup, CSS and basic javascript on his own, in order to speak and understand the language of flanking fields.
Providing feedback and communicating actions by motion design – Joining the motion design team at deepblue networks for a while – in the role as Mobile Designer – , Daniel was surrounded by Motion Designer and 3D Artists. In this environment he sharpened his sense for motion graphics, user interface animations and interactive prototypes.
Adding customer values – Most recently Daniel did a lot of responsive and mobile design, creating websites, apps, and experiences that scale well across all devices, often working together as an ecosystem and that bring real value to people.
Skills
Having worked in various positions/roles over the last couple of years including Mobile Designer, Interaction Designer, Product Owner, Scrum Master and Team Lead, I am well-versed in a wide range of disciplines and accompany the entire product development process. I call myself a generalist.
Together with my team our daily tasks are to identify, investigate and validate a specific problem and develop, design, test and ship a perfect solution. Multiple tools help us to get this job done: customer journeys/journey mapping, flow charts, wireframes, prototypes in different qualities, pixel perfect mockups or animations. We do have a lot of conceptual iterations based on user feedback including frequent releases of app (iOS/Android) and/or web clients.
For that, I have acquired a deep understanding for different project components including research, prototyping, animation, coding, analytics, visual and interaction design as well as timing and budget. These diverse skillset help me to create and iterate a solution even faster in order to take into account both, business and customer values.
How I work?
With a great team – For me one of the most important keys to achieve amazing results is a great team, that is highly motivated and talented! That's really priceless. And this team includes you (e.g. as a client) as well, because the best results grow in partnerships.
With learning and sharing – We work in a connected and complex world. Mostly hardware and software working together in a partnership and enable us to use products and services of our everyday life. For that, it takes a lot of challenges and skills to bring such services to life. The best environment to face this complexity is a good team, where you can learn from others as well as share your own experiences and learnings.
With culture and attitude – Really amazing products emerge by passion. If the team is taken of this love for the product, then you can develop extraordinary things. Reaching this point has to do with culture, that is the base for a good (team) attitude.
I love to share
To share my ideas and knowledge in the community – especially in the discipline of Interaction Design – I work closely with the Art Directors Club, the PAGE magazine or the Hamburger Kreativgesellschaft. We try a lot of formats to help job starters find their way to working life. Brochures have been produced with PAGE (connect/ccc), that inform about the discipline of IxD, laid out at universities. Furthermore, we visited conferences and festivals to talk about real working environments and daily work in companies (PAGE job talks). Occasionally, I write articles and give seminars.
Tools I use
Tools must be accessible and efficient as possible. For me, the most effective tool to communicate more clearly with others, make first impressions and to increase my understanding of complex subjects is sketching. I think with my pen and make ideas understandable for others.
To avoid an workflow of silos and non-reusable outcome, it is important to use smart tools, that the whole team can operate and collaborate with. For example exporting a technical documentation as a static PDF and handing it over to the development is not really handy. My philosophy is to work as close as it gets with developer tools to have the minimum viable product as soon as possible in the process. Additionally, this guarantee a dialog between different mindsets.
Below you can find an extract of tools I am familiar with and love using regularly:
Interested to talk in detail?
Alright, let's get in touch and have a coffee together.
mail@danielkraenz.com