Simon Gwinner
UX/UI Designer
Experience
Apr 2023 - Present
2 years 3 months Berlin, Germany
UX/UI Designer
Freelance
- Designing (digital) experiences for a diverse range of companies and startups.
- Helping them with product discovery, user experience research & strategies.
- Transforming concepts into visually compelling and functionally robust digital solutions and systems, ensuring a seamless blend of aesthetics and functionality.
- Led a project for Überseehub to launch their first product, empowering potential property buyers in the process of buying their first property. Responsibilities and achievements included:
- As part of a small product team, I was responsible for leading the design process of the app, iterating on features and functionalities based on user & stakeholder insights.
- Created a brand foundation and a set of reusable styles and components documented in a design kit to steer the further development process of the app.
- Helped the team launch a market-ready MVP with a core set of features, defined the foundation of a brand identity, and helped design the app and landing page within 3 months of working for Überseehub, an innovation hub empowered by a public bank.
- Conducted a benchmark and competitor analysis to outline the scope of the MVP version of the app:
- Together with the Product Manager, benchmarked competitors based on different points of view.
- Mapped all their UX flows and product offerings, and also looked at their visual language and small moments of delights to learn from.
- Prioritized a core set of functionalities and UX principles that would steer the process of designing the MVP.
- This exercise also helped to identify user group archetypes and user needs relevant for the future. Defined proto-user groups with core user needs for future validation and to help prioritize initial ideas and functionalities in a now-next-later roadmap.
- Defined the foundation of a brand identity & designed a design kit and style guide:
- Addressed the challenge to define an initial brand identity for the market-ready MVP version that would stand out from competitors while also guiding other brand touchpoints like the landing page or social media campaigns, as some initial functionalities were already designed and implemented based on Material Design components & style guide.
- Together with another Designer, created a set of brand principles and defined the core elements needed to redesign the app and other brand touchpoints.
- Created a style guide for other team members as well as the foundation of a design system for the app and landing page.
- Delivered implementation-ready screen flows for a market-ready app and landing page:
- Used the new design kit to redesign the existing features and functionalities.
- Improved UX flaws identified internally or mentioned as part of initial interviews with potential users about concepts.
- Implemented moments of delights based on competitor analysis in this revision.
- Started designing a set of new features and functionalities relevant for the market launch, including the login flow, a personalized home screen/dashboard, and additional calculators to help users estimate the market value of properties and receive initial finance options from different banks.
Jan 2020 - Mar 2023
2 years 3 months Berlin, Germany
Senior UX/UI Designer
Infarm
- Designing digital experiences and internal tools at Infarm.
- Spearheading initiatives to unlock the transformative potential of vertical and on-demand farming services for urban communities.
- Aimed to revolutionise access to freshly grown products and cultivate sustainable food systems through innovative solutions and strategic exploration.
- Project: A vision of an autonomous agriculture operating system for Infarm’s global farming network.
- Infarm needed a strong vision and strategy for its digital operating system, to be a shared aspiration for the whole team building it. It was important to create a compelling and believable story to guide people through why the company aimed to build this operating system long-term.
- As part of a small strategic team, I was responsible for leading the strategy process of defining this holistic vision of the operating system.
- Conducted user research, designed user experience & user interfaces, while also testing, and documenting the vision & strategy, working closely with Product Managers and Technical Stakeholders.
- Ran co-workshops to outline the future journey of how Infarm's hubs will evolve within the next 3-4 years:
- As part of the initial research phase, ran a remote workshop with stakeholders from product, software & operations to define a high-level E2E hub journey and define opportunity areas to steer the vision work.
- Started with a status-quo map highlighting current pain points and ideating around key moments and opportunities how to solve them.
- Based on this workshop, defined a future E2E hub journey, highlighting key moments per user group, and the prioritised opportunity areas to deep dive into within the next phase.
- Based on the insights gathered during the workshop and from additional research, created initial proto-user groups of the future to direct the concept phase.
- Drafted an initial vision through high-level concepts & validated them through concept testing sessions:
- Within the concept phase, started creating visual scenarios of the key moments selected.
- Based on these scenarios, designed initial concepts as wireframes and started drafting an information architecture as well as a solution outline, and experience principles.
- It was important to define a tangible vision as early in the process as possible and then use concept testing sessions to test and validate these concepts with end-users. Based on their input, iterated further on the concepts, information architecture and solution outline.
- Delivered a tangible vision and actionable strategy based on real user-, business- & operational needs:
- Based on the wireframe concept, created tangible, high-fidelity concepts of key screens.
- Created a clickable prototype for the teams and potential users to experience the vision hands-on.
- Within the presentation, showcased the vision solution and explained it in detail while also highlighting the next steps needed to move towards the north star.
- As a follow-up to the vision work, started drafting a feasible 1-year from now version of the vision together with Product & Engineering, looking again at gaps to overcome and defining an ideal roadmap divided into 3 phases: now, next and future iterations.
- Project: The foundation of a scalable design system as the main contributor at Infarm.
- Initiated and kicked-off the process of building the foundation of a scalable design system covering all of Infarm's internal tools to enable UI/UX Designers and Front-End Engineers in vertical teams to build new features more efficiently and consistently.
- Responsible for the design part of the Design System, created the foundation of Design Kits using Figma, and started documenting the main components & patterns.
- Started working on implementing the Design System together with Frontend Engineers, and gradually replaced old components with the new ones created.
- Defined Design System Principles & Experience Values to guide the further design process:
- As guidance for the further design process, defined Design Principles that would guide the creation of the foundation of the design system.
- Created Experience Values that would highlight user needs and expectations of the overall experience they have when using tools, and features and interacting with the interfaces designed.
- Both layers were used to design, validate and challenge new and existing components and design patterns. To make both the DS Principles and Experience Values more tangible, also created an open space to collect and share best practice examples.
- Uncovered discrepancies and differences in the interface and started establishing the path for consistency:
- Ran a design audit to identify patterns and their main components and build a strategy on how to bring convergence into all disjointed product experiences throughout digital tools.
- Asked front-end engineers and designers about their main needs and pain points when designing & shipping new features.
- Started looking into how to improve some of the components and patterns used through best practice examples of DS principles & UX values.
- Decided to follow the Atomic Design methodology for building components and use IBM Carbon DS and Google’s Material Design as main references.
- Built the foundation of the Design Language System while designing & documenting components & patterns:
- Started building the Design Kits for Desktop and Mobile and made sure all components would pass accessibility standards and follow the DS principles & UX values defined.
- Divided the Design Kits into three Libraries. This would enable later creation of local components more independently while still sharing the same core assets.
- As part of the Design Kits, also documented the do’s and dont’s, and overall anatomy of the components and started creating design patterns and guidelines.
- The Design Kits were accompanied by onboarding guides and a governance model for Designers and Engineers on how to contribute to the design system initiative.
Feb 2018 - Dec 2020
2 years 11 months Berlin, Germany
UX/UI Designer
Designit
- Designing tailored user experiences across diverse industries with a deep understanding of sector-specific needs, user behaviours, and emerging trends.
- By leveraging industry insights and employing versatile design strategies, created impactful digital solutions and services that resonated with users and drove measurable results in sectors as mobility, finance, consumer electronics, telco, and beyond.
- Project: A holistic, omnichannel experience for a key telco in Saudi Arabia & GCC.
- Defined a new digital brand strategy & designed an omnichannel experience across all digital touchpoints for a major Saudi Arabian Telco brand that would fit neatly into the opening of their market and culture as a whole.
- As part of a bigger design team, responsible for defining the digital rebrand strategy from a user experience perspective and designed screen flows for the B2C Mobile & Smartwatch App, as well as the B2B Web portal.
- Involved in building the foundation of the Design System documenting components, patterns & templates.
- Defined a digital brand strategy through benchmark research & experience principles:
- Kicked off the project with a competitor's benchmark to get a better understanding of the current Telco market and define how the client could stand out from their main competitors in the Saudi Arabian Telco Market.
- Analyzed national and international telco brands upon four experience layers.
- Based on these insights, showcased the client market-specific examples of how their brand could evolve and defined the foundation for their Digital Brand Strategy.
- Created unique Experience Values that would lead the further process of defining their Omni-Channel Experience from a customer perspective.
- Found opportunity spaces for digital touchpoints & evaluated ideas through wireframe concepts:
- Started defining Customer Journeys and Archetypes upon existing research material from the client.
- Highlighted possible opportunities on these journeys and first ideas on how to create a holistic experience for different customer needs and how they connect to experience values.
- Together with the client, selected main-use cases that should be covered either by their Website and/or App + any additional digital services integrated within the Omni-Channel Experience.
- Started sketching first ideas and visualizing them with wireframes and lo-fi prototypes that were shown to potential customers on-site.
- Translated wireframe concepts into user interfaces and created hi-fi prototypes for the main flows:
- Simultaneously the visual team started exploring and defining visual directions. Started by exploring two visual directions for which mockups were created.
- Together with the client, decided on one direction that matched their expectations and aligned with the insights gathered during the initial research phase.
- After defining the core style guide, started translating the wireframes into user interfaces and hi-fi prototypes for the main screen flows.
- Was able to show some of these concepts again to potential customers on-site and continued iterating on some of the flows and patterns to improve the whole omnichannel experience.
- Documented patterns in a Design Language System & create a for adaptation to the Arabic version:
- As the main deliverable, created the foundation of an evolving Design Language System.
- In the Design System, documented all components and patterns as well as the main flows for their new Website and Mobile App, additional B2C & B2B Web portal-, and Smartwatch concepts, and an Android adaption of the Mobile App.
- As most of the customers would mainly speak Arabic, also needed to translate some of the core screens to right-to-left reading styles.
- Together with some in-house Designers from the client, came up with additional guidelines on what to keep in mind when mirroring the designs so that the experience would still feel very close to the initial concepts.
- Project: Bold watch faces tailored to every lifestyle for a multinational technology & consumer brand.
- Developed a wide range of watch faces covering different lifestyle needs for the multinational technology and consumer brand's soon to be released smartwatches.
- Delivered 170 watch faces for 11 different watch face models using a people-centric framework that helped create watch face concepts tailored to different lifestyle moments.
- As part of a team of six designers, responsible for defining a wide variety of mood boards, stories, and concepts and developed several of these concepts further into watch face interfaces, including implementation-ready components. Some of these watch faces were static, and some were animated.
- Defined a people-centric framework to map values, needs, and desires to the watch face functionalities:
- Brief directions (technology, fashion, sports, etc.) were the starting point coming from the client.
- Defined a people-centric framework that allowed mapping potential user groups together with use cases based on their values, needs, and desires for those themes.
- With this framework, was able to combine lifestyle moments with the technical capabilities of the smartwatches.
- Based on these combinations, created tangible stories that would give the client an understanding of the different directions the broad themes could take and provide a framework for coming up with new ideas for the watch faces.
- Explored directions through stories & mood boards, making the concept tangible and visual:
- Based on the stories, created mood boards making the described lifestyle choices, values & user needs tangible.
- These mood boards would also cover visual references of how the watch faces could look like as well as what functionalities could be covered on each of the watch faces.
- For each concept, defined 3 different varieties incl. different mood boards, ranging for example from diverse to focused.
- Together with the client, chose the concepts & mood boards to explore further and use as a base for designing the watch faces.
- An example story for a concept: “Designed for weekend warriors, Outdoor Freedom offers minimalistic yet dynamic expression and features to match the user’s long-standing ambition. The use of bold, crisp typography ensures relevant information is easily understood, while the colour scheme reminds you that the watch is all about fun and passion, rather than professional necessity.”
- Designed 175 animated and static watch face concepts for 11 different watch face models:
- Within two-week sprints, created multiple design variations for each of the selected concepts.
- Using different design tools, was able to deliver static as well as animated and even 3D concepts.
- Some of the concept visuals would adapt to data collected by the watch face or integrated APIs like the weather.
- All watch face concepts were accompanied by user experience guidelines and separated into components.
- In total, delivered more than 175 watch face concepts from which, up until today, more than 39 made it into production and were launched on the market for some of their new watch face models.
- Project: Making old cars smart (again) for an iconic automotive brand.
- Explored how to add value to older cars with connected features through the concept of retrofit vehicle connectors (RVC) tailored to real car owner needs.
- Delivered an app with six connected car features that were tested in an initial pilot phase with 180 participants.
- Together with my lead, responsible for defining and testing feature concepts and designing user experience and user interfaces.
- Ran qualitative & quantitative research to test the acceptance of these features, while helping the client determine the vision and success criteria for their connected car initiative.
- Generated ideas for a potential pilot in co-workshops while keeping feasibility and other constraints in mind:
- An in-depth market & competitor research helped get an overview of how clients can set themselves apart from the competition.
- Tried some of the existing products to better understand how these products work and what value they give to drivers.
- Used this initial research as a base for a collaborative ideation workshop.
- Together with stakeholders, project leads, and engineers from the client-side, ideated potential solutions on how to provide non-connected cars with connected features and checked them against research, feasibility, or other constraints.
- In the next phase, started visualizing the most voted ideas in wireframes and lo-fi prototypes.
- Tested and evaluated features within an initial pilot with 180 potential customers and car owners:
- Before launching the pilot, conducted several user interviews on-site as well as remote to find out more about how participants use their cars, their needs, and their pain points.
- Showing them some initial concepts, was able to identify additional needs & test some early concepts and get to know better their expectation.
- Based on these findings, continued iterating on initial concepts and created a first MVP for the pilot with six core features that were then launched.
- Through a three months pilot phase with 180 potential customers, was able to test and validate features in two-week sprints and improve as well as launch new features based on the feedback received.
- Validated assumptions and collected valuable feedback to define KPIs for future strategic objectives:
- At the end of the pilot, ran a series of qualitative interviews with around 80 users to better understand how the pilot was perceived in terms of feature acceptance and value.
- An online survey sent to all 180 participants (133 users participated) helped further confirm findings and identify potential user groups and their preferences.
- Final analysis & further outlook including UX principles was put together. This report would help the client determine essential KPIs for future strategic objectives and have as well a significant influence on other running projects in development with a focus on connected car functionalities and apps.
Jan 2016 - Present
8 years 6 months Zürich, Switzerland
Radio Host
GDS.FM
- Every second month I'm connecting the dots between all kinds of genres and music styles on Zurich-based internet radio station GDS.FM.
Jan 2016 - Dec 2020
3 yearsCo-founder & Multimedia Artist
INT RA
- INT RA is a multidisciplinary art collective, I co-founded together with Nora Gailer and Lorena Strohner.
- We created two interactive installations, that were exhibited at Jungkunst 15, in Winterthur, Unpainted Digital Art Fair in Munich & at Zauberwald in Lenzerheide.
Jan 2016 - Jan 2018
1 year 1 month Zürich, Switzerland
Interaction Designer
Freelance
- Consulting early-stage startups from a user experience point of view.
- Creating vision decks.
- Delivering implementation-ready designs for landing pages & mobile apps.
Feb 2016 - Sep 2016
8 months Munich, Germany
Interaction Design Intern
Designit
- Designing hands-on on a variety of client projects for the mobility, finance, and consumer electronics market while continuously learning.
Jan 2014 - Present
11 years 6 months Switzerland
Co-founder & Editor
Orange Peel Musikblog
- Orange Peel is a renowned swiss music blog focussing on all kinds of better contemporary pop music.
- I co-founded the blog with a bunch of music enthusiasts and still regularly write and curate better pop music for a growing audience.
- I also designed and implemented the whole website.
Summary
I am a Designer with 5+ years of working experience My name is Simon Gwinner. I was born in 1991 as a franco-suisse child of the sun growing up close to the mountains in some of my own ideas & concepts about social & at the intersection of design, strategy, and research. Switzerland & becoming what I am today while living in technological structures, cultural dynamics, potential Germany, Hong Kong, and in different communities on the futures, and contemporary pop music. internet.
When not working on client projects, I further explore some of my own ideas & concepts about social & technological structures, cultural dynamics, potential futures, and contemporary pop music.
Languages
German
Native
English
Advanced
French
Advanced
Education
Oct 2013 - Jun 2017
Zurich University of the Arts
Bachelor's degree in Interaction Design · Interaction Design · Zürich, Switzerland
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