From Physicist to UX: The Long Way Home

I didn't set out to become a UX researcher. Like most good career paths, mine happened through a series of wrong turns, chance encounters, and one spectacular consulting failure.

The Early Years: Physics and False Starts

I started university studying physics. The math was elegant, the problems were solvable, and the universe made sense on paper. Then I switched to mechanical engineering, thinking I wanted something more applied, more tangible.

I made it through Vordiplom—the first two years—before realizing something crucial: I was bored.

Not "this is hard" bored. Not "I need a break" bored. The bone-deep boredom that tells you you're in the wrong place entirely.

The Turn: Communication Design

I switched to communication and multimedia design at FH Potsdam. Finally, something that combined visual thinking, technology, and human behavior. I was building interfaces, designing interactions, making things people could actually use.

Then I met the professor who changed everything.

He didn't teach design techniques or software tools. He taught the science of UX—the research methodologies, the cognitive psychology, the evidence base that separates good interfaces from guesswork. Suddenly I understood why some designs worked and others didn't. There were principles. Patterns. Ways to test and measure and improve.

I was hooked.

The spectacular failure

I joined a company armed with all of it — the research, the frameworks, the evidence base. I had everything except the one thing that turned out to matter: the ability to get anyone to act on it.

I failed. Completely.

Nobody wanted my UX audits. Nobody implemented my recommendations. I could see what was wrong and prove it, and none of that mattered, because I couldn't turn a finding into a decision anyone with a budget was willing to make. I hadn't learned to read the politics, or to make the case in language a stakeholder actually heard.

It was humbling. It was also the most useful thing that ever happened to my career.

The Education: Learning to Do It Right

I realized I needed proper training—not just in research methods, but in consulting, facilitation, stakeholder management, and how to actually help organizations change. So I went back to school for my MSc in Usability Engineering.

This time, the education stuck. I learned how to:

Conduct research that answers business questions, not just academic ones
Present findings that drive decisions
Build relationships with stakeholders before proposing solutions
Navigate the messy reality of organizational change

The Practice: Research Agencies and Real Projects

After graduating, I worked with top UX research agencies like eresult. Field research at trivago. Usability testing across finance, healthcare, travel. Contextual inquiries for enterprise software.

Every project taught me something new about how people actually work, what tools they need, and how to help teams build better products.

The Work: What I Do Now

Today, I help teams build thoughtful products grounded in research. Design systems for insurance and banking platforms. Hardware control interfaces that translate physical knobs to software. Biometric surveillance tools for law enforcement.

The work spans domains, but the approach stays the same: start with context, understand what people actually do, identify the gaps, and build systems that bridge them.

The through-line

Look at the path as a list and it reads like indecision: physics, mechanical engineering, communication design, a failed consulting venture, a master's in usability engineering, agency research, independent practice. It felt like indecision at the time, too.

It wasn't. Physics taught me to distrust any explanation that isn't measured. Engineering left me needing the abstraction to touch something real. Communication design was where those two finally met—visual thinking with a reason underneath it. And the failure, the part I'd most like to skip past, is the hinge the whole thing turns on: it's where I learned that being right is worthless if you can't move anyone, and that the distance between a good finding and a made decision is the job. The master's gave me the method to close that distance on purpose instead of by luck.

None of it was a detour. UX is just the place all of it finally has somewhere to go—the research, the rigor, the craft, and the hard-won sense of how organizations actually change their minds.

What's next

I'm exploring privacy-first personal data infrastructure with Solid Pods, continuing the design-systems work, and — as ever — learning more from the teams I work with than from any framework.