This is me
Short version
Hi, I'm Maija and I'm a user experience designer, certified OOUX strategist, scrum master, mentor, workshop facilitator and former teacher. As part of the design team at HDNET GmbH & Co. KG, I won the German Red Dot Design Award in 2021 for the digital product viewport.
In the UX process, I have specialized in requirements management, the research and product definition phase as well as information architecture. My UX career has so far confronted me with some very diverse industries and sectors: Engineering and civil engineering, midwifery management, furniture industry, human resources, tariff consulting or marketing platforms. In my work, I am particularly inspired by neuroscientific, (social) psychological and linguistic insights into human thinking and understanding of the world around us. With my work, I want to create easily accessible, intuitively navigable and barrier-free digital worlds.
Outside of work, I am active in sports, especially CrossFit, or I train with my dog for the test at the DRK rescue dog squadron in Paderborn. Otherwise, I like to immerse myself in books or bake.
Long Version
Glass Ceilings
As a child, I spent most of my free time outside and played a lot of soccer on the street with other children. Unfortunately, I grew up in a village at a time when girls weren't allowed to play soccer and you had to be twice as good as the boys before you could be the only girl on the boys' team.
When I was 9, I was finally able to train in an U-15 girls' team with girls who were sometimes almost twice as tall as me. This taught me that you have to assert yourself as a girl in our society, but also that you have to help and support each other.
Lesson 1: It is not acceptable for arbitrary glass ceilings to be introduced and maintained for girls, which only lead to more competition instead of mutual support. So the seed was already planted here that later motivated me to support and empower others to stand up for themselves.
Intercultural Communication
In 2006, I went to the USA for a high school year and experienced a completely different, western culture. In addition to learning the language, I was suddenly confronted with different political and social rules and issues that had never affected me before in the village in Germany: the gap between black and white, structural racism, gender stereotypes, which were particularly prevalent in high school. As a newcomer, I was warmly welcomed, but I was able to observe many things and sharpened my eye for processes and structures as well as lived rules, which today help me in UX to read between the lines and create awareness of barriers and exclusion.
UX by detours
After graduating from high school, I was overwhelmed by the choice of options and freedom. I first studied Intercultural Communication and Business Studies for two semesters before deciding to take the safe route as a secondary school teacher with the subjects English, Politics & Economics, Sport and German as a foreign language. Here I was able to hone my skills, e.g. presenting in front of people, structuring content and information into processes and goal-oriented tasks, leading workshops and analytical observation and evaluation of human behavior.
In class, I worked a lot with scaffolding and sketchnotes because I quickly realized that it wasn't just me who was losing my bearings in our increasingly fast-paced digital world, but that the students were doing the same. Therefore, I tried to make the lessons user-oriented with many feedback rounds and queries and always only set a framework in which the students could find their own way to complete the task. This is already a milestone in my path to becoming a usability expert, as these frameworks were nothing more than a preliminary stage for what we call user flows in UX.
In order to always find motivating, interactive and independent learning paths for my students, I have been working a lot with digital tools and their usability for teaching. In 2020, during the pandemic, I also came across UX design as a subject area and quickly started a bootcamp at CareerFoundry alongside my school work and completed it within a year.
Due to growing frustrations with the restrictions of the school system and the tendency to equalize people within it, I decided to enter a UX career to enable users to use digital platforms independently and smoothly with a wider reach and to empower them to fulfill their tasks in a targeted manner.
Using the Corona Time-Out Wisely
... and this is me today
As a teacher, it has always been instilled in me that learning is never finished and is lifelong. That's why I saw every new project as a new challenge and learning opportunity and enthusiastically threw myself into new areas such as agile working, Scrum and OOUX in order to do justice to my work and my values (being collaborative, goal-oriented, effective and innovative). Therefore, I have always tried to make my work team-oriented and collaborated and discussed intensively with product owners, scrum masters, UI designers, frontend and backend developers in order to find the best solutions for users in the end. Whether in legacy products, whose UX I inherited, or in new products that I was able to shape from the very beginning, as a teacher I was always taught that learning is never finished and is lifelong.
That's why I saw every new project as a new challenge and learning opportunity and enthusiastically threw myself into new areas such as agile working, Scrum and OOUX in order to do justice to my work and my values (being collaborative, goal-oriented, effective and innovative). Therefore, I have always tried to make my work team-oriented and collaborated and discussed intensively with product owners, scrum masters, UI designers, frontend and backend developers in order to find the best solutions for users in the end. Whether in legacy products whose UX I inherited or in new products that I was able to shape from the outset.
My favourite part of user experience design is recording requirements, moderating between all participants, resolving complexity and finally the initial visualization of the solutions. I achieve this through my workshop experience and stringent, proven and structured methodology.
All my previous experiences have made me the UX designer I am today. You can find my previous experience in short case studies, compare it to my projects from my education on Behance or visit my LinkedIn.
My favourite part of user experience design is gathering requirements, moderating between all stakeholders, resolving complexity and finally visualizing the solutions for the first time. I achieve this through my workshop experience and stringent, proven and structured methodology.
All my previous experiences have made me the UX designer I am today. You can find my previous experience in short case studies, compare it with my projects from my training on Behance or visit my LinkedIn.
For You
Workshops
Certificates
Process