# Josef Richter — Product Designer & Builder

I design and build web & mobile apps, turning complex business problems into simple, easy-to-use flows. 15+ years of experience working with fuzzy goals and fluid environments. I'll learn everything about your business, coz without that it's impossible to do great design.

- Website: https://josefrichter.design
- Email: josef.richter@me.com
- Phone: +420 608 631 657
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/josefrichter/

## Skills

- **Design:** UX design, flow simplification, prototyping, UI design, design systems
- **Development:** Elixir, Swift/SwiftUI, JS/TS, React/RN, Rust, Clojure
- **Tools:** Figma, Claude Design
- **Domains:** CRM, SaaS, HealthTech, FinTech, Telco, Transportation

## Experience

### Design Lead — Enaia, New York City (2024–2026)

Enaia is a massive commercial real-estate CRM platform. It is used by leading companies in the sector like CBRE and JLL.

I was a lead designer, taking the existing product to a completely new level, implementing a design system, unifying the experience across the product, and designing the new user experience around complex features.

I reported directly to the CEO and CTO. (Contacts available for reference.)

We developed plenty of prototypes, ranging from simple click-through mockups to product forks with experimental features.

I was working directly in the codebase throughout the full-stack, from design, through frontend, up to some backend features — authoring 765 pull requests, shipping design changes directly rather than just handing off specs. My technical background allows this deep integration in the team, which removes the usual bottleneck between design and development.

Key topics:
- Design system & unified UX
- Clean up and streamline experience around complex features
- Strong team integration across full stack
- Advanced prototyping in Figma, html/css/js, Elixir, Swift

### Design Lead — Mobile Platforms — Medable, Palo Alto (2022–2023)

I was rebuilding the patient experience, especially the core part of collecting data for clinical trial studies — delivering a full redesign of the trial-participant companion app, used in 110 countries worldwide.

I developed trial participant personas, which are significantly different than usual personas in other industries. This was a foundation for better understanding of our users across the company.

In short term, I redesigned the core interfaces for collecting data in clinical trials. I introduced consistent & coherent style and experience across the products and across platforms. This included finding intersection of the UX best practices and often completely opposite, extremely complex, scientific and regulatory requirements.

In long term, we were completely rethinking what a patient experience might look like, if we were to build a modern, mobile-age solution. Decentralisation of clinical trials is a massive topic, as studies take 10–12 years, cost $2.6B on average, and completion rates are very low at around 10%. We were turning a basic data collection utility tool into a full experience and smart guide throughout the whole journey of diagnosis, treatment, and clinical trial participation.

Key topics:
- Analysing and defining Patient Personas
- Rethinking and redesigning patient mobile experience
  - Short term — new generation of eCOA/ePRO (clinician/patient reporting) on mobile platforms
  - Long term — vision of patient journey before, throughout and after a clinical trial
- Strong focus on accessibility requirements, given specific target group
- Cross-platform mobile design system
- Advanced prototyping in Figma, Framer, SwiftUI

### Mobile Design Lead — Vodafone, London (2021–2022)

I was redesigning the TV app for mobile & tablets. Our wider team was designing the TV app, as well as the hardware. I was creating a mobile-first interface, that is different from the TV app.

I was also upgrading the design system to reflect mobile requirements, and adhere to latest Human Interface Guidelines and Material Design Guidelines.

I was building advanced interaction prototypes, mainly in Framer.

Key topics:
- Mobile & tablet UX/UI of Vodafone TV
- Upgrading visual style and design system for the mobile apps
- Redefining the user experience of the mobile and tablet apps
- Advanced prototyping in Framer

### Design Lead — Smart Home — T-Mobile, Frankfurt (2018–2022)

Started by introducing a full blown design system into existing product across platforms.

I suggested a different product strategy — existing product was a geeky playground that allowed anyone to build scenes and automations. I suggested a new concept of "stories" = common everyday situations that shall be pre-programmed and usable out of the box, with zero config.

We started as a "skunk works" side project of 4 people in their free time, where I was the only designer. After a few months, the company decided to make our project the primary one, reallocated more than 100 people to it and decided to phase out the old one. This was a massive accomplishment in a company that is relatively conservative and big decisions require significant buy-in from several layers of management.

Key topics:
- Creation and implementation of (Atomic) Design System
- Supervising visual redesign and consistency of the whole SmartHome project (~10 people design team)
- Leading the introduction of the Design System across design and development teams (design team + leaders of development teams)
- Solving technical aspects of DS creation, collaboration, maintenance, expansion, versioning, distribution across teams, etc. on the design side
- Driving and coordinating the implementation on development side, reflecting different platform specifics, current code base restrictions, and gradual process of refactoring the current code base
- Tooling & processes required for DS (Sketch, Abstract, Sketch Cloud, Dropbox, InVision, Framer X, Zeplin)
- Design System "evangelism" across all levels of the organisation
- UX rethinking and redesign of some of the core components of current product
- Shift towards standardised platform specific components familiar to users, and building product (and design system) on top of them
- Stricter study and adherence to Apple Human Interface Guidelines and Google Material Design Guidelines
- Evangelism of data driven design and stronger focus on mass market non-tech customers
- Introducing advanced prototyping tools and techniques (InVision Studio, Proto.io, Framer X, React, Vue.js) for massive savings in development
- Summary at https://www.smarthome.de/

### Freelance Designer & Builder — Worldwide (2009–now)

Building my own products — mobile & web apps — alongside freelance work for startups worldwide. Fascinated by high-concurrency problems (too many people → server crash).

- **Stock Sorted** — Shopify app for shared inventory across stores; Shopify can't handle it natively, a textbook concurrency problem. https://apps.shopify.com/stock-sorted
- **nutritious.love** — AI calorie tracker: scan food, get nutrition-change recommendations, and more. https://nutritious.love
- **HabitPass** — iPhone app that builds a language-learning habit by locking out social media. (in App Store review)
- **Tideman** — a tool that helps students test their implementation of the "final boss" algorithm from Harvard's CS50. https://tideman.netlify.app
- **francis_template** — open-source Elixir package for file-based HTML templating in the Francis web framework (my personal website runs on it). https://hex.pm/packages/francis_template
- **francis_sqlite** — open-source SQLite integration for the Francis Elixir web framework. https://github.com/josefrichter/francis_sqlite

### Senior Consultant M&A — Ernst & Young, Prague (2005–2009)

- M&A team, International Tax Structuring team
  - accounts: Bank of Tokyo Mitsubishi, Macquarie, GE Money, Raiffeisen, HVB Bank, Unicredit, SAB Miller, Pilsner Urquell, TRW…
- this experience gave me good understanding of the world of finance and business, international tax structures, accounting rules, etc.
- came handy doing my international taxes too :-)

## Testimonials

> Josef has been one of the most thoughtful product design leaders I've had the pleasure of working with throughout my career. His level of professionalism and organization within the craft of product design was incredibly impressive. He consistently demonstrated the value of doing things "the right way" in order to sustain and scale design solutions. An aspect that I was particularly impressed with, Josef embodies the "strong opinions, loosely held" mindset that I value in a senior-level designer. He would spend the appropriate time on research and collaboration and then not only execute thoughtful solutions, but passionately defend them. But many times, when faced with new information or conflicting evidence, he was willing to re-work through problems and discover new solutions. Any product team would be fortunate to work with Josef and have his approach represented within their environment.
>
> — Joshua Bryant, Director of UX & Product Design, Medable

> It's rare that you come across exceptional talent like Josef. I had the pleasure of working with Josef for two years on a mobile app relaunch where 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 not only made a huge difference in the productivity of our team, but also led to extraordinary results in user testing.
>
> — Timon Reinhard, Lead Product Owner — Magenta Smart Home, T-Mobile / Deutsche Telekom

> 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. His ability to work with a team remotely is impressive; always sending inspirational resources and bringing out the best in his collaborators. I recommend working with him!
>
> — Sina Mossayeb, Chief Design Officer, Medable

See all testimonials at https://josefrichter.design/testimonials or on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/josefrichter/