Josef Richter

Product Designer & Engineer

I help companies, from garage startups to corporations like T-Mobile and Vodafone, improve their mobile & web apps by simplifying them. It’s not easy to make things simple, but I have 17 years of experience doing that 🙂. Bridging the divide between design and development (and management) is also my forte, and it goes a long way.

T-Mobile Smart Home

Red Dot Award winner 2022 — MagentaZuhause app iF Design Award — MagentaZuhause app

This started out as introducing a design system to an existing product. It ended by reorienting the whole product concept & strategy and rebuilding the whole product from scratch. We turned a geeky playground into a modern consumer product.

I know what you’re thinking – shoot, definitely don’t wanna end up rebuilding from scratch! But hear me out – the new product won the Red Dot Award and the iF Design Award. And Apple adopted the same concept after us. So maybe we did something right.

Read the full story
T-Mobile Smart Home app screen T-Mobile Smart Home app screen T-Mobile Smart Home app screen

“It’s rare that you come across exceptional talent like Josef. He showed outstanding product design skills and a deep understanding of product strategy.”

“I was particularly impressed by Josef’s ability to remove nonessential complexity from the product, which led to extraordinary results in user testing.”

– Timon Reinhardt, Lead Product Owner, Magenta Smart Home, T-Mobile / Deutsche Telekom

Enaia

Enaia is a commercial real-estate CRM used by giants like CBRE (the world’s no. 1) and JLL (no. 2). Commercial real estate is a very specific business with plenty of unwritten rules and complex social dynamics – very hard to reflect in software. I worked in a trio with the CEO and the CTO, every day, making that happen.

“I wish we’d had you when we started this.”

– David Young, CEO, Enaia

“Josef works across visual design, UX and front-end, and takes his own work from idea to shipped rather than handing off mockups. That combination is genuinely rare, and ideal for startups.”

– Neil Berkman, CTO, Enaia

My Process

I believe good products come from thorough understanding and structured process. Thorough understanding of problem at hand, the industry, the users, the business side. And then applying this knowledge throughout logical steps, call it Design Thinking or whatever you like; the point is to not fool yourself.

Read about my process

Medable Clinical Trials

Medable — Study Participant App Concept: a row of mobile screens from the redesigned clinical-trial app

Medable runs decentralised clinical trials. I led the redesign of their participant app – used globally and translated into 110 languages – focusing on the self-reporting forms participants use instead of visiting their physician.

The constraint was brutal: these forms have collected data for 20–30 years, and any change, however tiny, can bias the data and invalidate a trial (average cost $2.6B, average duration 12 years). Yet a full paper form is unusable on a phone. We worked closely with scientists to find the narrow middle ground between user needs and scientific validity. It might be the most sensitive app design work there is.

Medable participant app — self-reporting form redesigned for mobile Medable — overview of redesigned clinical-trial app screens

“One of the most thoughtful product design leaders I’ve had the pleasure of working with throughout my career. He consistently provided a welcomed, best-practiced approach to solving some of the trickiest challenges.”

– Joshua Bryant, Director of UX & Product Design, Medable

“Josef is a bright holistic design thinker. He is able to break down the brief or problem into smaller clear parts, and provides clear paths to take.”

– Sina Mossayeb, Chief Design Officer, Medable

Advanced prototyping

I’m a big believer in advanced prototyping – simple but functional apps that focus on the one feature in question. It’s far cheaper to hit dead ends here than in development.

Here’s a simple AI copilot prototype I put together these days.

Read more about this prototype here.

This T-Mobile prototype uses Dialogflow for speech recognition (note this is pre-AI era) and Firebase to talk between two prototypes – a phone app and a desktop app that simulates a room in an apartment. All built in Framer.

hi5 is a prototype of a conversation app. It helps the user choose the right medical marijuana for their problems, obtain a medical marijuana card, buy the best solution, and process payments – all in a chat.

Back in 2017, this was built on:

  • api.ai / Dialogflow API – an early language-processing AI, quite long before the current LLM era.
  • Contentful API – the “back office” for the inventory.
  • Framework7 – a mobile UI framework for the native iOS look & feel (still powering it today).
A hand holding a phone running the hi5 conversation app

Open the hi5 prototype full-screen.

Code

I write code so I understand what I’m working with – what’s easy, what’s hard, and what developers need from me. Mostly Elixir, plus Rust, Swift and TypeScript/React.

I build my own products – mobile & web apps – alongside freelance work, often wrestling with high-concurrency problems (too many people → server crash):

  • Sorted – event registrations that don’t crash under heavy load. Fully agentic event management.
  • Stock Sorted – Shopify app for shared inventory across stores; Shopify can’t handle it natively, a textbook concurrency problem. (why it’s harder than it looks)
  • nutritious.love – AI calorie tracker: scan food, get nutrition-change recommendations, and more.
  • HabitPass – iPhone app that builds a language-learning habit by locking out social media.
  • Tideman – a tool that helps students test their implementation of the “final boss” algorithm from Harvard’s CS50.
  • francis_template – open-source Elixir package for file-based HTML templating in the Francis web framework (this very site runs on it).
  • francis_sqlite – open-source SQLite integration for the Francis Elixir web framework.

More of my work is on GitHub.

Build a Twitter clone on the BEAM A step-by-step Chirp tutorial in Elixir + Francis – realtime, multi-user, zero external infrastructure.