RALPH HINDERBERGER

Senior UX Manager

Better Business by Better Experiences. Since more than 25 Years.

User Research - UX/UI Design - A/B Testing & Personalization - Digital Product Management

ABOUT ME

My profession: improving online businesses by creating positive experiences.

Interest in good prices lead users to your shop? A need for relevant information drives them to your website, or achieving their individual goals makes them use your app?

Great. But once with you, do you give them the positive experiences convincing them to stay, buy, come back, talk about you - or whatever other business goals you might have?

Since mor than 25 years, I take responsibility for the creation, management and optimization of such business-critical experiences. A combination of success-proven KPI optimization methods, understanding of technologies, strong communication skills and passion for user and customer needs build the soft skill base for that.

My work positively contributes to center the digital transformation of companies actively around tangible human needs - for managers, CEO`s, users and customers.

Since 2 years, I own the data-driven Online Shop Optimzation Lead role at MEDION in Essen, Germany. In this role, I account for the success of the following tasks:

• Online User Research

• A/B Test and Personalization team lead

• Onsite UX lead

• Internal UX consulting (C-level)

• Onsite design team lead (interim)

• Conceptual design lead

So, welcome to my personal one pager resume! I hope you enjoy your stay.

THE WAY

How to create online business success? Simple: mimic positive offline experiences - online.

What distinguishes an average shop, site or app from a good one? To my experience, it's something quite simple: "good" online resources are characterized by the same things that make you love your favourite coffee store:

Upon arrival, you immediately feel comfortable. Inside, the ambience quickly makes you forget about the outside world. Trust in the staff and processes, fostered by clear and friendly communication, creates a sense of being appreciated as a human being. Your beverage or meal looks and smells delicious, and can be accompanied by a selection of well-matching "add-ons". Quick and convenient payment save time and worries. And when you leave, you are already looking forward to return as soon as possible.

A modified "Design Thinking" process enables me to transfer this perfect blend of emotional connection and pragmatic quality to delightful web experiences:

• 1. Ideation

  To generate ideas on how to better fulfill tangible user needs, a sound knowledge of the context of use is essential.

  This can be achieved by a combination of user research, consumer psychology and cognitive design. Benchmarking to already established best practices is also an option.

  Mapping these ideas to business KPIs ensures management buy-in at later stages.

• 2. Prioritization

  By using the PIE method (for Potential-Importance-Ease), each optimization idea is mapped to tangible user and business needs.

  The result is a balanced "Test winning potential" scorecard - a valuable tool making it easy to identify and sort out low vs. high impact optimization ideas based on a fact-based process.

  Due to this thorough test idea pre-selection, winning prediction accuracies usually range between 60% and 80% - precise enough to guarantee a long-term profitable testing.

• 3. Conceptual Solution Design

  Next, the optimization ideas need to be visualized.

  This can either be done by creating wireframes (or "skeleton screens") to give a rough first impression of the interface - or detailed screen designs closely resembling the intended final layout are created.*

  If more than one screen should be optimized, both wireframes or detail screen designs can be linked to another forming an interactive prototype.**

  *While wireframes are used as "blueprints" when a digital usage process is created from scratch, detailed screen designs are used to modify already existing user interface ("UI") layouts.

  **Prototypes that can be pre-checked on real devices, e. g. during user lab testing. But since they do not consist of HTML, CSS and Javascript, they are not apt for quantitative A/B testing.

• 4. Test - Learn - Repeat

  New design optimization solutions are tested qualitatively and/or quantitatively.* Test winners are declared based on pre-defined KPI`s (see above, step 2 "Prioritization").

  An important lesson learned on user testing: even the most thorough preparation cannot guarantee a 100% accurate prediction of every optimization idea's detail impact.**

  Only an iterative cycle that revolves around gathering new insights, developing optimization ideas, testing, learning, and implementing improvements, will complete the picture over time.

  *Qualitative testing with only 5 to 15 users generates optimization ideas by deep-diving into the real end user world, whereas quantitative testing with potentially unlimited test participants verifies the optimization effectiveness on a statistical base.

  ** Missing information details on users and their as individual as complex world prevents an absolute correct winner assessment right from the start.

• 5. Personalization

  Most user tests show that not all optimization ideas are equally effective for all users. In Personalization, audience-specific A/B test winners are identified on a statistical base, and will be shown after the test only shown to those user groups who are susceptible to them.

  By time, Personalization brings in a bigger return on investment than individual random "mass audience test hits": while the latter happen only from time to time, almost any A/B test has winners for a fraction of about 10% of the overall audience.

  So you the more often you test and personalize, the higher and the quicker the sum of all KPI uplifts pile up - and the more successfull your online business will perform.

  The premise for that: your pre-test process is able to predict potential test winners with sufficient accuracy... see the previous steps 1 to 4.

• 6. Stake Holder Management

  UX Optimization and Personalization are cross-sectional tasks: a lot of departments need to cooperate to get it done.

  Only the early identification of, communication with and reporting to potentially responsible stakeholders ensures the necessary management buy-in and result acceptance.

Achievements

My Expertise in Numbers.

Resume

Applied eCommerce customer centricity. Since 1995.

Professional carrer steps between 1995 and 2007 incl. education are available upon request.

THINGS I KNOW AND DO WELL

Skills

1. AREAS OF EXPERTISE

HINT: the following characteristics are ment to be descriptive -> they are not interactive.

2. TOOLS

3. SOFT SKILLS

Companies

Some of my ex-clients and employers

PERSONALITY

About me

I was born in the Ruhr Area and love my regional coal mining roots: hard work in industrial landscapes now belonging to the UNESCO world heritage. However, I regard myself as well as a world citizen: cultural differences enrich my life, going to far away places broadens my perspectives.

As depicted at the beginning of this page, my business goal is to re-create the positive customer experiences separating favourite from average offline coffee stores (or restaurnts, shops...) in the online world.

To achieve that, I use my empathic, communicative and analytical skills to talk, listen, observe and learn from average people trying to reach their individual goals. A broad interest in many different fields - like design, psychology, technology, and businesses - helps me to see the connecting patterns between them leading to such experiences, and to build the required connecting ties.

The ability to prioritize, structure and co-ordinate the necessary workload leading to increased user or customer happiness makes me a UX manager. Apparently being interesting to talk and listen to, finding clear and transparent arguments for or against something, and having the ability to visualize complex things in the most simple way, a UX consultant. Knowing a lot about quite different digital things, and the will to play around with the possibilities, a Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) specialist.

I love to travel and enjoy activities in nature. Enriching my social live makes me happy as well. Meditation and Tai Chi help me, to keep my mental balance and prevent me from breaking down under stress. Here are some details to literally picture this:

Contact

Thanks for visiting my online resume!

I would be happy to be contacted via LinkedIn.

Bye, and hope to see you soon! Ralph