Self-published cookbook "Drachenfutter"
In my spare time I created and self-published a cookbook called „Drachenfutter“ for people who love dragons and cooking just as much as I do.
All recipes, text, layout as well as illustrations were created by me. I published it through Amazon and do my own marketing online (e.g. Amazon Advertising, Google Ads, Landing page, Social Media)
The book is available on Amazon or the local comic book shop.
Final result
In the end I created a good entrance point and foundation for the full migration of the system. And while there were many problems with migrating a running and used system step by step the whole team now had a basic understanding of where they were going from a UX perspective, enabling them to work more independently. I still supported the team for the following years, finally handing over the project to another designer.
Learnings
In this project I learned the immense value of being in really close contact with your users. There were many situations where their feedback was really important and improved my design, where in another project you may not have asked them because contacting a user would have been much more effort. On the other hand, I also learned to face the dangers of being really close to your users like staying in control of too much feedback and managing personal opinions.
I also learned to handle a big design project all by myself, conducting all the research, prototyping, wireframing and graphic design without support of other designers.
In this project I learned to love complex systems, because while a legacy administration tool might not be really fancy, it sure is an interesting challenge to balance all the different connections and dependencies in your head while designing.
Constantly balancing normal users‘ requirements with those of the power users taught me a lot about prioritizing and compromising to accommodate different target groups.