Max is a Senior Interaction Designer at IDEO in San Francisco, where he designs and prototypes product experiences across different platforms and industries.
Index
Gallery
Under NDA
Case Study
Leveraging LLMs to enhance customer support in home appliance repair
Partnering with a leading U.S. home improvement retailer, my team designed a Language User Interface (LUI) that enables both professionals and DIY enthusiasts to diagnose and repair home appliance issues, regardless of their skill level or available resources.
The primary goal of this project was to enhance user confidence in tackling home repairs, directly aligning with our client's objectives to increase parts sales, improve customer satisfaction, and foster long-term customer retention. More broadly, the initiative sought to challenge and shift the industry's reliance on planned obsolescence, thereby paving the way for a more sustainable future through innovative service offerings.
As the Lead Interaction Designer, I led a team of UX designers through the product design process, collaborating closely with project management to define the tool's strategic vision. Together, we crafted the end-to-end user experience and developed a scalable, responsive design system ready to adapt to evolving needs.
Moreover, I worked closely with the technology team, including data scientists and front-end engineers, to ensure seamless integration and development of the MVP. Overall, my role was to design and guide the transition of the tool from concept to launch and prepare it for market introduction.
Skills
2024
Music Publishing Website
Web Development
HYPERVISION
Freelance
🎹
2023
Design Portfolio
Web Development
Claire Whitman
Freelance
👰🏻♀️
An app designed to bridge in-store and digital shopping experiences
Expanding on previous work for a luxury beauty retailer, my team at IDEO designed a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) for an app that aimed to support our client's omni-channel retail strategy, enhance in-store engagement, support conversations between beauty experts and customers, and bridge the in-store and digital brand experience.
As the Interaction Designer on the team, I was responsible for the end-to-end user experience of the product. This included developing early concept sketches to explore design ideas, designing the UX and UI for 10+ features, and creating a comprehensive product design system that included a library of reusable UI components, defining design patterns, and establishing guidelines for interaction behaviors and visual elements.
Furthermore, I created provocations for user research that the team used to gain insights into customer behaviors, preferences, and pain points. Furthermore, I created high-fidelity prototypes that simulated the end-to-end user journey and were used as storytelling devices during stakeholder meetings. Finally, I collaborated closely with our external development partners to create a comprehensive product documentation that included design specifications, interaction guidelines, and assets for implementation. This ensured a seamless handoff of the design to the development team and facilitated a smooth transition from design to development.
Skills
A tangible vision for future-fit beauty retail spaces
Our client, a luxury beauty retailer in the US, partnered with IDEO to develop visionary blueprints for its next-generation flagship stores. Our goal was to create client-led, technology-enabled, and omni-channel retail experiences that would elevate customer satisfaction and retention.
In a 12-week project, my team sought inspiration from best-in-class luxury retail and service experiences, and engaged in extensive research, including speaking with industry leaders and gathering feedback from key customer groups. We utilized live prototyping in one of our client's stores to test early concepts and identify pain points in the customer journey, from inspiration to consideration to purchase. Ultimately, our project resulted in a set of designed signature 'moments that matter' in the customer journey and tangible recommendations for our client.
As the Interaction Designer on the team, I researched emerging trends and technologies at the intersection of physical and digital retail, focusing on omni-channel experiences that would seamlessly integrate digital elements into the physical store environment. In addition, I created experiential prototypes for specific moments along the customer journey which were used for testing and validation during our on-site prototyping sessions. In the final stage, I developed high-fidelity, interactive prototypes for a retail app that delivered personalized shopping experiences and supported in-store consultations and product fulfillment.
Skills
A vision for shopping that is built by and for Gen Z
Our client, a major player in Silicon Valley, approached IDEO to formulate a future-facing strategic vision for their e-commerce platforms that would address the unique needs and behaviors of the next generation of shoppers, as well as fuel platform growth and support a shift to the Global Youth market.
Over a period of four months, our team engaged three cohorts of young adults across India, Japan, and the US to imagine, build, and validate possible design solutions. This iterative and highly collaborative process defined strategic opportunity areas that inspired a set of tangible concepts and prototypes.
As an Interaction Designer on the team, I researched edge commerce experiences as well as emerging trends and technologies within the e-commerce space. Furthermore, I created experiential prototypes for research, and led the design of high-fidelity, interactive prototypes for key UX-flows, both for mobile and desktop.
Skills
Experiences that inspire employees to share, connect, and bring forward their best work
Our client, a market-maker in the beverage industry, approached IDEO to replace its existing intranet and reimagine how employees connect with content and communicate with each other in an era of hybrid employment.
Our team reimagined our client's employee communications experience through a set of opportunity areas derived from research, interactive prototypes, and a feasible plan to execute on our proposed vision and support follow-on development.
As the Interaction Designer on the team, I designed and facilitated client workshops, as well as ideation sessions. Based on opportunity areas identified in research, I then developed user personas, design principles, as well as exploratory sketches and low-fidelity prototypes for testing. Finally, I designed high-fidelity, interactive prototypes for key user flows, features and interactions.
Skills
Digital experiences poised to disrupt the holiday lighting space
Our client worked with IDEO to identify opportunity areas in the holiday lighting space which has historically been a loss leader for retailers. However, incremental product innovation, rising prices, abundant advances in relevant technologies, and momentum around e-commerce set the conditions for major market disruption.
Over the course of eight weeks, the team researched the use and end-to-end customer experience of existing consumer Christmas lights, and interviewed customers, analogous experts, and professional lighting installers across North America in service of unearthing future opportunities for design.
I joined the team for the two final weeks of the project to boost their Interaction Design efforts and help bring the most promising opportunity areas to life at higher fidelity. My contributions included the design of an interactive lighting installation planning tool for mobile devices, as well as curatorial product experiences for our client's website and online catalog.
Skills
A shared vision for the future of online travel discovery
Our client, a global video sharing platform, partnered with IDEO to explore how its platform recommendations might expand and strengthen the path to travel booking, helping users discover and be inspired for their next trip.
In a 6-week sprint, the IDEO team conducted field research and qualitative research sessions with cross-functional client teams, as well as 10 ‘extreme’ users and travel content creators across the US. Based on the insights gained from research, the team designed new product experiences for travelers and creators, and developed a storytelling piece that was used to inspire and align cross-functional stakeholders within the client organization.
As the Interaction Designer on the team, I developed early-stage concepts and activities used in research, and designed high-fidelity prototypes for mobile and desktop, according to our client's design systems and product guidelines.
Skills
A new visual system that is more flexible, diverse, and inclusive
Our client's Visual Systems team redesigned the visual language of one of its core platforms, as part of a broader effort to make the product more appealing and relevant to young adults.
My team at IDEO conducted a research sprint to understand how the initial visual system directions were resonating with young adults, both to provide insights to drive their refinement and validate that these territories were directionally resonant with the target audience.
As the Interaction Designer on the team, I led the effort of turning the visual systems into design prompts that were used during research. Furthermore, I designed research activities, led interviews, created visual assets for storytelling, and co-led the synthesis of our learnings into actionable recommendations for our clients.
Skills
Leveraging UX to build stronger emotional bonds between users and their Operating System
Our client's UX team partnered with IDEO to identify how design could influence users’ trust in operating systems and build stronger emotional bonds and loyalty with an OS.
Building on existing research, the IDEO team investigated key user attitudes, behaviors and pain points and identified five opportunity areas for the UX team to pursue. Each opportunity area framed a specific UX brief which included representative UX concepts.
As an Interaction Designer on the IDEO side, I worked alongside designers from our client organization and conducted user interviews to round out the research and test prompts and provocations. Furthermore, I helped generate representative UX concepts, in screen and prototype form, that the UX team took on and developed further.
Skills
Designing light, sound, and time-aware experiences in the context of smart home
Sonos worked with Above to explore and define novel experiences, concepts, and multimodal interfaces for its suite of wi-fi enabled products.
As a UX Designer on the team, I developed and prototyped experiences, scenes, and control modes for on-device controls, using a multi-modal approach to develop a single system UI that would enable interactions across devices and platforms.
Skills
Smart home devices creating safer home environments for children
IKEA worked with Above to make homes and products safer for customers with children. Specifically, we explored and ideated a variety of physical and digital solutions focused on preventing tip-over accidents, and used research and design to validate and prototype these solutions.
As a UX Designer on the team, I helped prototype a set of hero concepts that were used for user testing. My contributions included the design of physical prototypes via CAD sketches and 3D printing, as well as connected digital prototypes for key features and hero moments.
Skills
2020
Modupipe for Orangutans
Interaction Design
San Diego Zoo
Freelance
🦧
2020
Who Are I (Master Thesis)
Research / Design / Writing
MFADT
Thesis Studio
🕵🏻♂️
2020
Spotify Groups
Interaction Design
Spotify PNZ
Cornell Tech
🎧
2019
YOLO (You Only Look Once)
Web Design / Machine Learning
MFADT
Design with ML
🤖
2019
IDEO Website
Web Design / Prototyping
IDEO (internal)
IDEO
💻
2018
Mercedes Benz ADVANTAGES
Web Design
Mercedes Banz
Nolte & Lauth
🚙
2017
Mercedes Benz Flexperience
Service Design / UX Design
Mercedes Benz
Nolte & Lauth
📱
2016
Forest Green Rovers Eco Park
Production Design
Forest Green Rovers
ZHA
⚽
Year
Project Name
Role
Client
Studio
Under NDA
Case Study
Max is a multi-disciplinary designer from Berlin, living and working in the US. He holds a B.S. in Architecture and received his MFA in Design & Technology from Parsons School of Design (2020), where he worked across disciplines using interaction, experience, and product design.
Over the past few years, Max has helped develop and launch digital platforms, designed and prototyped multi-modal interfaces for smart home devices, and crafted enrichment opportunities for Orangutans.
Max is a multi-disciplinary designer from Berlin, living and working in the US. He holds a B.S. in Architecture and received his MFA in Design & Technology from Parsons School of Design (2020), where he worked across disciplines using interaction, experience, and product design.
Over the years, Max has helped Big Tech develop and test big ideas, prototyped multi-modal interfaces for smart home devices, designed products aimed at making homes safer for children, and built enrichment opportunities for orangutans at the San Diego Zoo.
At IDEO, Max works on future vision projects, crafting story narratives, designing the future state of existing products, as well as envisioning and building completely new services and products. As an Interaction Designer, he helps project teams consider the interactions that people have with complex systems, software, services, and each other. While he enjoys facilitating human-centered design practices for clients and other stakeholders, his true passion lies in building interactive prototypes of varying fidelity and complexity to articulate design opportunities and bring tangibility into the design process.
Recently, Max has been diving into project leadership, guiding creative teams through each stage of the product design process — from research and concept prototyping, to testing and launching live products.
Google
IKEA
Mercedes Benz
Meta
Sonos
Spotify
Youtube
Interaction Design
Product Design
System Design
Web Design
Digital Prototyping
HTML / CSS / JS
3D Modeling
Physical Prototyping
IDEO, San Francisco
2021 – Current
Above, Remote
2020 – 2021
Nolte & Lauth, Berlin
2017 – 2018
Parsons School of Design
MFA Design & Technology
Cornell Tech
Product & BigCo Studio
Technical University Vienna
B.S. Architecture
Bio
Max is a multi-disciplinary designer from Berlin, living and working in the US. He holds a B.S. in Architecture and received his MFA in Design & Technology from Parsons School of Design (2020), where he worked across disciplines using interaction, experience, and product design.
Over the years, Max has helped Big Tech develop and test big ideas, prototyped multi-modal interfaces for smart home devices, designed products aimed at making homes safer for children, and built enrichment opportunities for orangutans at the San Diego Zoo.
At IDEO, Max works on future vision projects, crafting story narratives, designing the future state of existing products, as well as envisioning and building completely new services and products. As an Interaction Designer, he helps project teams consider the interactions that people have with complex systems, software, services, and each other. While he enjoys facilitating human-centered design practices for clients and other stakeholders, his true passion lies in building interactive prototypes of varying fidelity and complexity to articulate design opportunities and bring tangibility into the design process.
Recently, Max has been diving into project leadership, guiding creative teams through each stage of the product design process — from research and concept prototyping, to testing and launching live products.
Over the past few years, Max has helped develop and launch digital platforms, designed and prototyped multi-modal interfaces for smart home devices, and crafted enrichment opportunities for Orangutans.
Currently, Max is exploring ways to leverage his experiences in architecture to design and prototype immersive experiences in Virtual Reality.
Google
IKEA
Mercedes Benz
Meta
Sonos
Spotify
Youtube
Product Design
System Design
Web Design
Digital Prototyping
HTML / CSS / JS
3D Modeling
Physical Prototyping
IDEO, San Francisco
2021 – Current
Above, Remote
2020 – 2021
Nolte & Lauth, Berlin
2017 – 2018
Parsons School of Design
MFA Design & Technology
Cornell Tech
Product & BigCo Studio
Technical University Vienna
B.S. Architecture
Bio
Max is a multi-disciplinary designer from Berlin, living and working in the US. He holds a B.S. in Architecture and received his MFA in Design & Technology from Parsons School of Design (2020), where he worked across disciplines using interaction, experience, and product design.
Over the years, Max has helped Big Tech develop and test big ideas, prototyped multi-modal interfaces for smart home devices, designed products aimed at making homes safer for children, and built enrichment opportunities for orangutans at the San Diego Zoo.
At IDEO, Max works on future vision projects, crafting story narratives, designing the future state of existing products, as well as envisioning and building completely new services and products. As an Interaction Designer, he helps project teams consider the interactions that people have with complex systems, software, services, and each other. While he enjoys facilitating human-centered design practices for clients and other stakeholders, his true passion lies in building interactive prototypes of varying fidelity and complexity to articulate design opportunities and bring tangibility into the design process.
Recently, Max has been diving into project leadership, guiding creative teams through each stage of the product design process — from research and concept prototyping, to testing and launching live products.
Google
IKEA
Mercedes Benz
Meta
Sonos
Spotify
Youtube
Product Design
System Design
Web Design
Digital Prototyping
HTML / CSS / JS
3D Modeling
Physical Prototyping
IDEO, San Francisco
2021 – Current
Above, Remote
2020 – 2021
Nolte & Lauth, Berlin
2017 – 2018
Parsons School of Design
MFA Design & Technology
Cornell Tech
Product & BigCo Studio
Technical University Vienna
B.S. Architecture