What’s your professional background and what’s your current job at BSH?
Unusual Jobs at BSH: The Psychologist for User Experience
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What do consumers deeply care about and how can we develop the best solutions for them to improve the quality of their lives at home? We talked to Henning Brau and asked him, why a Psychologist is particularly suited to answer these questions. In his job as User Experience Manager he uses his skills to better understand consumers needs and enable other people to work consumer-centred.
I am an Psychologist with a background of 15 years in user-centred design. Here at BSH I am working as User Experience Manager in our corporate strategic marketing department.
How did you find out about BSH and this job?
Actually it found me. I was leading a UX design agency here in Munich before. In that function I consulted big organizations in making their processes and products more user-centred. When I received a call one day if I did not want to join BSH’s journey to be fully fledged consumer-centred company it was an easy choice.
Why do you think a psychologist is particularly suited for this job? Which skills can you use in your daily tasks?
Psychologists usually are trained in interviewing and observing as well as in statistical data analytics. Plus they have a good understanding about human perception and learning. So they can help organizations to look a bit behind the curtains and find unanswered user needs. Personally, I also am enabling other people to work consumer-centred. So I benefit from coaching, training and moderation skills as well.
What do you like best about User Experience?
To start projects with caring for consumers just feels right, doesn’t it? UX is a deeply humane approach to work on products, services and also business models. It brings together what a company should do with what it is best at and what it simply has to do: a) care deeply for consumers to b) develop good solutions to improve life quality which c) enables us to make business with that.
What’s the most challenging aspect of your job?
UX is still not formally trained in many economics and engineering schools. So there is still a lot of convincing and training on the job to be done for UXers. Now that Design Thinking has somehow become a global trend, however, that has improved.
What do you like most about your work for BSH?
To see the impact that UX has made in our company in the past few years. I can work with multidisciplinary and self-organized teams on all kinds of topics all around the globe and be part of their journey to consumer-centricity. To me that is a value of its own. Finally, our UX Team definitely is the most inspirational environment I have witnessed so far. Could be worse, right?
What are your plans for the future?
As UXer I should say we don’t make plans, we create prototypes, test them and change them if needed. And basically that is what it is like. I will continue to spread the word, work with self-organized teams, tear down professional silos and in the end have fun with that. We will see where that leads me.
Do you have an unusual job at BSH? Perhaps you have a traditional job title, but with a twist? If so, we want to hear from you and you too could be featured in our next article right here on Stories.
