Josef Richter

Product Designer & Engineer

results-oriented design technical fluency cutting edge AI workflows craft over slop 15+ years of experience

Enaia CRM

  • From MVP to mature product used by CBRE (world’s #1) and JLL (world’s #2)
  • Working daily in a trio with the CEO and the CTO
  • Complex broker workflows with unwritten rules and social dynamics turned into simple software
  • Fully agentic design system pipeline
  • Working prototypes in code, like the board below – try dragging the cards
Details
“I wish we’d had you when we started this.”
David Young
CEO, Enaia

T-Mobile Smart Home

  • Napkin sketch to consumer app rolled out in 8 countries
  • From 0 to 150 person team
  • New product concept and strategy, sold to management through working prototypes
  • Design system deployed across 6 scrum teams
  • Red Dot Award and iF Design Award winners
  • Apple adopted the same concept after us
Details
“It’s rare that you come across exceptional talent like Josef. He showed outstanding product design skills and a deep understanding of product strategy.”
Timon Reinhard
Lead Product Owner
T-Mobile Smart Home
T-Mobile Smart Home app screen
Red Dot Award winner 2022 — MagentaZuhause app iF Design Award — MagentaZuhause app

Medable Clinical Trials

  • Led the redesign of the participant app, used globally in 110 languages
  • Moved 20 to 30 year old scientifically validated forms to mobile without biasing trial data
  • Worked directly with scientists on every design decision
  • Rolled out new mobile & tablet design system across platforms
Details
“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
Medable — Study Participant App Concept: a row of mobile screens from the redesigned clinical-trial app

Stock Sorted Shopify App

  • My own product, taken from 0 to 1: from discovering the problem in merchant forums to a live app on the Shopify App Store
  • Real-time shared inventory across stores, a concurrency problem Shopify can’t handle natively
  • Everything is mine: research, positioning, design, Elixir engineering, App Store listing, analytics and support
  • Not much of a visual design: the UI style is given by Shopify
Details
Stock Sorted — shared stock dashboard inside the Shopify admin

Advanced prototyping

  • Simple but functional apps focused on the one feature in question; far cheaper to hit dead ends here than in development
  • Below: an AI copilot prototype I designed and built myself in a few days; a few years ago this would have taken a team a month
  • More on the subpage: a voice-controlled smart home and a 2017 conversational commerce app, both long before the LLM era
More prototypes

Code

  • I don’t hand off static files. I ship working software.
  • I write code so I understand 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 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.
  • 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.