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We’ve all been working from home for a year now. But after a year in the home office, we’ve noticed that we’re missing something crucial: human interaction. The creative, colorful activity in a shared place. So we set out to find a solution.
We are proud to offer user-centric solutions not only for clients, but also for our employees. At Centigrade, we all now have the ability to leave the four walls from time to time and be just as productive outdoors as we are in the office. At the same time, we also see each other completely real and yet safe again. We are really looking forward to it 🙂
Digitization? Yes! But is that only possible from a permanent, stationary office? We don’t think so 🙂
Providing a good working environment is one of the most important goals at Centigrade. An environment that allows all employees to come to creative life.
Corona hasn’t made that any easier.
Of course, we’ve all been in the home office since April 2020, and of course, working in the home office has also made a lot of things easier.
But after a year in the home office, we’ve noticed that we’re missing something crucial:
The human interaction. The creative, colorful activity in a shared place.
That’s why, even before there were any vaccination plans in sight, we started thinking about what the working world of tomorrow might look like as an alternative.
After all, we are UX professionals! We translate human needs into innovative solutions every day! Why not do the same here?
In countless remote meetings and Miro Board sessions, we finally came up with the one crucial idea. We want to redefine collaboration and workspaces.
When are you in a flow state and what does that even mean? Does gamification only consist of points and rewards? Thomas Immich answers these questions in the Konzepthaus Digital Podcast with Samuel Lottner.
Establishing communication, responsibilities and processes at concept, design and software engineering is sometimes a lion’s task. The gap is still extremely large. “They don’t talk to each other” – according to Thomas. But how do you bridge these disciplines?
In the Moodboard Podcast, Thomas Immich and Samuel Lottner address this.
Back in October 2020, Thomas Immich highlighted the development of virtual and augmented technologies in his presentation “Inner pig dog meets boss” at the Health Reality event. However, VR & AR in medical technology will continue to be of interest to us in 2021. read more…
Customer loyalty is more important than ever. But how can UX and gamification be used to really bind customers to a product or a company? Thomas Immich will answer this exciting question in his presentation “The user in flow with his energy – Why UX & Gamification know neither tariff nor service boundaries” on Tuesday, March 9 at the “User Group Product Management and Sales” event organized by Energieforen. The presentation will be supported by current project examples from practice. read more…
FOCUS-Business publishes an annual list of the top employers of medium-sized businesses in cooperation with kununu. Centigrade has made it to the list again in the 2021 edition thanks to the good kununu ratings! Yeah, we are happy!
Since the outbreak of the Corona pandemic, scientists and politicians have been appealing to the common sense and responsibility of all companies to send employees to the home office wherever possible. Now a list of positive examples is circulating on the web. Centigrade is on it!
Dear readers,
the year 2020 played havoc and will forever be remembered by the collective memory. The corona virus has caused staggering losses. Against the background of human losses, it seems a little cynical to write about financial setbacks. Therefore let me say in advance: Although it is one of the toughest economic years in our 15 years of existence for Centigrade and all our colleagues, all of us are first and foremost grateful that we and our closest environment are not affected by health problems.
This year our card design symbolizes the adaptability and team spirit that our colleagues have demonstrated more than ever before. The transition from close cooperation to a geographically separated home office has caused us very few problems, both technically and in terms of content, as this working mode has always been an integral part of our modern work culture. Like in a bustling beehive, all colleagues continued to work on their own honeycomb and knew what to do for the big picture through constant communication. After the first wave, however, we also noticed how many colleagues were drawn back to the shared office space. Unfortunately, this kind of “swarming together” will not happen in the long run and will need a lot of perseverance.
In addition, we have decided to adapt our branch office strategy to the new working from home situation. For example, we moved our Mülheim a. d. Ruhr location to a smaller office in Düsseldorf and closed our Munich location  indefinitely. We have also converted many of our collaborative UX workshop and training formats to solely remote formats. Just recently, a group of participants on the customer side unanimously confirmed that this new form of collaboration is in no way inferior to traditional face-to-face events.
We continue to see a positive outlook, particularly from the fact that we have been able to gradually reduce the temporary short-time work which we had to introduce due to the overall economic situation since the middle of the year. Now we got back to our first month without short-time working.
We would therefore like to thank all our colleagues for taking these drastic steps and for allowing us to remain a functioning unit. Especially in our 15th anniversary year, this means a lot to me personally and we all toasted to this with good wine at our digital anniversary celebration.
A further bright ray of hope was provided by the fact that, together with our long-standing life science customer Tecan, we are no longer just passive observers of the corona crisis in our professional everyday work: this year, Tecan asked us to develop and optimize the user experience for certain applications. Tecan machines, which are used in many German test laboratories, are also used to perform the very important Sars-CoV-2 tests. So now PCR test workflows like this one are defining the fascinating new world of topics that our UX designers and engineers are able to address. The whole project team is highly motivated by the meaningfulness of this work. We would like to take this opportunity to thank Tecan for the trust they have placed in our work.
We would also like to thank you – especially for remaining loyal to us and for taking so many of the partly rocky new paths of cooperation with us. Without your commitment and reliability, we would not have been able to master this year so unscathed. We hope that you have been spared from the corona virus in your private life and will continue to be so.
Due to the special circumstances, we even more wish you and your family this year that the upcoming Christmas brings you some relaxing and contemplative days. I would like to conclude by saying that we wish you good health first and foremost – much more than the often vaunted business success.
Thomas Immich
Owner & Managing Director
Despite contact restrictions during the pandemic, we can continue to offer our customers high-quality trainings. After it became clear that on-site visits would no longer be feasible, we redesigned selected training courses for online implementation. However, it was not our intention to simply transfer the previous formats into virtual space – instead, we completely revised them and adapted them to the new training situation. This was the only way we could ensure the high quality of the online version.
