During my second term at university, I began working at Siemens as a Product Design Working Student. My main responsibility was to assist the HMI Design Team in creating new design systems for their customers' Human Machine Interfaces (HMIs) and to enhance existing ones.
As part of my responsibilities, I have collaborated on several international HMI design projects for prominent clients from the automotive, mechanical engineering and tech sectors.
Throughout my tenure, I was often involved in the full design process - from initial research (primary and secondary) to user experience and user interface design and even to parts of the implementation in Siemens' TIA Portal (a development environment for HMIs). In this role, I was also able to leverage my experience in front-end development to deliver well-designed, functional HMIs.
In HMI design projects, it is common to have various stakeholders involved. To ensure a smooth project initiation, my team and I conducted multiple design sprints to bring all parties on board. To facilitate these sprints, we also traveled to customers throughout Europe to conduct them in-person, in collaboration with the clients.
To better understand the work I did at Siemens, you can review a detailed case study that I wrote about one of our projects.
EXPLORE CASE STUDY
In addition to providing design services to clients, I was also responsible for developing a standardized "Design System" for the team that could serve as a template for new HMI design projects. To accomplish this, I created an internal design system within Figma that was adopted by the entire team as a foundation for new projects. This system was designed to be adaptable and evolve over time, as my team and I continually refined and improved it by incorporating the lessons learned from our projects and incorporating new features or elements as needed.
As Siemens is a global and international corporation, my team frequently collaborated with colleagues based in China. To support this collaboration, I conducted multiple training sessions on Figma to ensure that our Chinese colleagues were proficient in using our collaborative design tools and environment.
I truly enjoyed my tenure at Siemens, working alongside a dynamic and motivated team that consistently challenged me to improve and truly demonstrated the significance of collaboration when addressing complex tasks.
