This past summer I had the opportunity to spend six months in Berlin, Germany, on “working sabbatical” with UX Guys. The reasons for going were complex – my wife’s academic research, our possibly optimistic desire to render the daughter bilingual, and my own infatuation with the place.
One of my personal goals for the trip was to work with a local agency or client. My priorities: gain some new experience, make contact with potential partners and clients in Europe, improve my German, and simply get out of the apartment.
Finding work proved to be relatively simple. I used LinkedIn and Xing (a European competitor) to connect with the local IA/UX community. Within two days of arrival, despite jet lag and appalling humidity, I met upwards of fifty colleagues at the quarterly “IA cocktail hour”. I learned that there was no shortage of interesting UX work in Berlin, much of it for mobile platforms, and a surprising amount in English.
While working remotely on a Calgary-based project over the summer, I pursued a number of leads until the call came from MetaDesign, an established agency with a strong print and brand identity background.
My first project at MetaDesign was a complex online catalog for an Italian manufacturer of architectural lighting products. We developed a filter solution powerful enough to cope with thousands of different products and dozens of possible facets. I divided my energies equally between designing and documenting the search and results interface, and attacking problems with the underlying data structures and labels. English was the language of client communication, though day-to-day work took place in German.
Our final two assignments were smaller interface-design problems for internal applications at Volkswagen. Working on “branding-free” projects was a refreshing change from public-facing sites, while the complexity of the applications, workflow and user tasks presented interesting challenges. Taking the high-speed train to meetings in Wolfsburg – at 250 km/h – was an added bonus.
When I look back on the experience, my overall impression of working for a German agency is that it’s really not much different from working for a North American agency, except that the office coffee is much, much better. (I still miss the enormous old espresso machine in our kitchen.) Work methodologies are similar, the work environment and agency culture are similar, the deliverables are similar. Clients are still demanding, projects still go off the rails sometimes, people still work late sometimes. Vocabulary may differ slightly (for example, comps or flats are “layouts”) but the underlying concepts and roles are the same.
While the UX profession doesn’t differ much on either side of the ocean, European office culture does differ in slight and subtle ways. Relations with clients are more formal, at least linguistically. On your birthday, you are expected to supply your own cake and share it with your co-workers.
Language is of course a major issue when working abroad. I am lucky in that my German, though far from perfect, is good enough to work on German projects with German clients. Ultimately I found this much easier than working in English with an Italian client – being a native speaker is almost a disadvantage in that one constantly overcomplicates their speech and writing. Potential expats beware: it may be a cliché, but at the same time true that “bad English” is the global business language. And while there are many opportunities for English-only work in Berlin (Nokia in particular) some understanding of the local language and culture will makes life much easier.
Overall, I enjoyed my “working sabbatical” tremendously. Quite apart from the friendships and contacts I made, and the workout my German received, the projects I took on presented a refreshingly different set of challenges from public-facing web sites. I had the chance to sharpen another set of skills.
Hopefully we’ll have more chances to work together with MetaDesign in the years to come.