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The End of the Digitalization Backlog?

The digitalization backlog in Germany seems to be slowly starting to clear up. Whether the reason for this is the 500-billion-euro special fund, the protection of our digital and analog sovereignty in times of war, or our dwindling competitiveness in the global market is, for now, irrelevant.

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Why Modernization Matters 

Across industrial and enterprise environments, legacy HMIs, desktop-based UIs still drive many mission-critical processes. These systems often perform reliably, but their technical foundations date back decades, making them increasingly hard to maintain, extend, and adapt to today’s user expectations. 

UX improvements in such systems often reach a hard limit – not because of design talent, but because the underlying technologies can’t support modern interaction models, responsive layouts, or cross-device usability. Meanwhile, the web ecosystem continues to evolve rapidly, bringing cutting-edge frameworks, design systems, and integration standards that define what users now consider a natural experience. 

By adopting modern web technologies – from reactive frameworks and micro-frontends to embedded browser engines – companies can meet today’s user expectations for accessible, collaborative, and visually consistent applications across devices. These technologies open a smooth, step-by-step path from legacy systems toward a modern foundation, allowing teams to evolve interfaces and functionality without interrupting ongoing operations. The result is a user experience that feels current, cohesive, and future-ready while preserving the proven reliability of existing software. 

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From CAD file to tangible machine

In many industrial projects, CAD data for machines has long been available—but it is often used solely as a basis for design. Yet this data offers enormous potential: with minimal additional effort, it can be used to create interactive 3D visualizations that bring machines, systems, or entire buildings to life, complete with statuses, error paths, and interactions.
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When people talk about ZDF in both large industrial corporations and medium-sized companies, they rarely mean the broadcasting company based in Mainz. Far more often, these three letters are used to promote the pursuit of the “new gold” of digitally networked ecosystems: numbers, data, facts.

In many companies, however, it is generally apparent that although reports, measurements, and analyses are available in abundance, the willingness and competence to consistently translate them into real improvements is often lacking.

This is precisely where the central challenge begins: How can data-based decisions be used in complex, heterogeneous organizations in such a way that they enable a noticeably better user experience for the end user? read more…

In the field of human-computer interaction, topics such as aesthetics, affective aspects of interface design, and emotional design have increasingly become the focus of user experience. In particular, Don Norman’s 2005 book “Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things” argued for paying more attention to pleasure and emotions in general in the UX design of a product. Emotions are also included in the basic principles of UX, which ultimately also refer to “joy to use.”

Designers now often design in such a way that users’ emotions are addressed. However, the emotions evoked also influence how users interact with a system. This is because they do not act (only) rationally; their decisions are often emotionally influenced. For example, users don’t necessarily leave a website (only) because they can’t find information, but (also) because they are frustrated or uncertain.

In this article, we will first look at the basics of emotion research and then examine the role emotions play in UX and how we can incorporate them into UX research and design. read more…

In this era of powerful AI image generation and freely available icon libraries, the question quickly arises: “Why bother designing icons ‘by hand’ at all?” For many, resorting to existing solutions may seem like the easiest and fastest way. But in reality, it has been proven time and again that “out-of-the-box” solutions are not enough—especially when requirements become more complex and individualized. This was exactly the case for us when we wanted to translate our Centigrade service icons into automatically generatable 3D visuals. It was a project that simply could not be solved with off-the-shelf solutions.

In this blog post, you can find out how I approached this design process, why we deliberately set creative limits, and what a Python script has to do with it all. read more…

Chatbots and conversational AIs are on everyone’s minds and can now be found in numerous applications and interfaces. But the question arises: Are conversational AIs really always the best choice?
When users need help completing their tasks and turn to a support bot, many seem to want to be transferred to a human as quickly as possible instead of dealing with the chatbot.
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The hype surrounding AI shows no signs of stopping for the time being: according to a study by Bitkom Research, the proportion of German citizens who use tools such as ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, or Gemini at least occasionally has risen from 40% in 2024 to 67% in 2025[1]. More and more companies are integrating conversational AI into their products. This makes it increasingly important for UX professionals to understand how users interact with conversational AI and what characterises a good user experience. In this article, I will discuss the factors that influence the user experience of conversational AI and how it differs from other interactive products. read more…

Who wouldn’t want a “Bob the Builder” for their own four walls, who immediately springs into action when something crumbles or molds appears? Such doers are hard to come by, and even the band “Das Lumpenpack” sings about their disappointment at having only educators instead of craftsmen in their circle of friends.

That’s how it is with building a house… but what about software development? Software engineers are also notoriously hard to find, and once you’ve fallen into the clutches of SAP, you might get your specialist, but you’ll have to pay a lot of money for even the simplest feature.
But that is changing dramatically because of AI.
Suddenly, thanks to AI, everyone can supposedly code, and developers—especially juniors—are being shown the door, replaced by AI agents that are willing to work and available everywhere. Jensen Huang even proclaims the end of computer science and says quite openly:

“IT-Teams will become HR departments of AI.”

Regardless of whether Jensen Huang is right or not, enough is changing to prompt a fresh approach to a rather old question that has surely occupied the minds of many a homeowner:

Modernize or demolish?

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As part of my student job at Centigrade, I was able to work on an exciting project over the past few months: the Continuous Product Toolkit (CPT). This toolkit combines helpful UX tools – such as a module that checks whether an uploaded screen is accessible for people with color blindness. read more…

Working with personas has long been established in product development – and at the same time is often too flat: nicely designed profiles that are presented once and then rarely used again. Thomas Immich, Managing Director of Centigrade and founder of the AI-supported tool LeanScope AI , is fundamentally rethinking this approach. For him, personas are not static images, but interactive projection surfaces – capable of dialog, adaptive and constantly evolving due to new findings in user research. In an interview with Annett Bergk, he explains how generative AI can accelerate and deepen the use of personas and make them more human at the same time. And why true-to-life text-based descriptions sometimes achieve more than a supposedly perfect profile picture. read more…