About Jürgen Spangl
Hi, my name is Jürgen Spangl, originally from Austria but now living in Sydney, Australia. I'm the Head of Experience Architecture at Vodafone Australia, previously I was a Managing Partner and Interaction Designer at GP designpartners. I have over a decade’s experience leading teams and creating user experiences for mobiles, the web, software, and physical products. I’m a highly skilled UX leader with a proven ability to inspire, lead and mentor others. I'm a strong proponent of a holistic view on product development — including the product as whole and above all the human perspective within the social and environmental context. With a solid and balanced understanding of the complex relationship between design, business and technology I act as a catalyst among the parties involved in product development.
I constantly improve the integration of user centered design methods into plan driven and agile software development processes, by encouraging collaboration and design thinking within the team. I recently finished my doctoral degree on this subject for which I developed »The Catalyst Kit« — a deck of cards to foster design thinking by focusing on the collaboration within the team and by providing methods and tools to improve the transition from concepts to the final product.
I'm dedicated to promote the discipline of user experience design. I’m teaching human computer interaction and user interface design and I’m the co-founder of the interaction design get-together Vienna and the usability round table Hamburg.
You can find out more about my experience and background in my detailed resume (pdf-file).
You can contact me at
jurgen@nuup.com
Resume
The Catalyst Kit
- The Catalyst Kit website
- The Catalyst Kit (Thesis; pdf with 19,5 mb)
Projects I have worked on ...
Data Station — seven with one blow
Client: Otto Bock Health Care
Development of both the interaction design and a user interface style guide to combine a range of seven independent medical applications for prostheses, orthoses and mobility solutions into one single platform in terms of technical architecture and user interface. The project was carried out in three locations: head quarter and product management in Germany, software development in London and Vienna, and interaction design in Vienna. With a holistic approach and the great teamwork between the client and our team we delivered impressive results.
TempRanger — a patent search engine
Client: Matrixware
In patent search the toughest goal is not to miss any relevant patent – this could cost a company millions of dollars. Patent researchers are not only looking for a result, but for a needle in a haystack. In addition to a full text search, TempRanger provides the novel tool of searching for temperatures and temperature ranges within documents. The aim of TempRanger was twofold: showing the process on how Matrixware brings academic research to the industry and the actual temperature search itself in the form of a web application.
cargoo — innovation in operation
Client: CRL Car Rail Logistics
The CRL cargoo: a closed double-decker car-carrier railway wagon. Our task was to improve the speed and safety of the loading procedure. Doing the interaction design for a product with no display involved was an interesting and rewarding experience. The new design was implemented in close collaboration with the specialized railway engineers.
Philips dpm 9600 — a tool for professionals
Client: Philips Speech Processing
The Philips dpm 9600 — a digital voice recorder with barcode scanner and docking station — proves that working simultaneously on the product design and the interaction design improves a products usability and gives it a distinct appearance. The design of the dpm 9600 was awarded with a iF design award.
aonVirenchecker — complexity made easy
Client: IKARUS security software
The aonVirenchecker grants the user the luxury of simplicity, so that she can focus on more important things, than virus protection. Invisible secure, without annoyance. Once a virus is found most anti-virus applications leave the users alone with many questions: How can I get rid of the virus? Is it better to delete this file? ... The aonVirenchecker offers contextual recommendations, so that the user is always in control of the situation.
Client: Sagem Communication
The user interactions necessary for recording an outgoing message on the Sagem/Philips fax machines were less than obvious. Sagem asked us to find a solution, but not without setting tight constraints: We were not allowed to change the functionality of any of the other buttons. We couldn't rearrange the layout of the keyboard. For feedback we could only use a 16 digit single line display, one led and a speaker. And as in almost every project: quick — to be exact: we had 3 days.
In 2004 the limitations of mobile devices in terms of cumbersome controls and small display size have inspired GP designpartners to research electronic pen and paper. The iPen is a study about a new communication-instrument.
Audi website — consistent and scalable
Client: Audi
In September 2000 Razorfish Germany was commissioned by Audi, the German car manufacturer, with the redesign of their global website, their national website for Germany and with a concept for the integration of all the dealer websites. Audi was faced with the problem that many small websites were created by different agencies, all of them on different technical platforms. Our task was to unite those websites and to provide a system which would allow to update content without HTML skills.
The websites were launched in December 2001.
mocca — assists without taking over
Client: Fabasoft
mocca is a pilot project to show the possibilities for mobile computing in the context of conferences. The focus was to unobtrusively assist the participants in usual conference situations (take and organize notes, annotate presentations, exchange info, chat ...) without taking center stage.
k2 — an user adaptable database client
Client: Trenkwalder
k2 is a database client for the biggest staffing service in austria. Usually database clients are driven by the structure of the underlying database design. We focused on the users needs in the special situation of handling many applicants with varied backgrounds and on the task to find and choose the right one efficiently in a multi user environment across different offices.