From a design perspective, we usually think about one side: What does the user perceive? What experience does she have? What happens in front of the curtain?

The other side interests me just as much – and I consider it one of the biggest blind spots in design: What is the experience for the people behind the curtain? For those who produce what others perceive and consume? Four projects from my career show why this question matters so much.

Early in my career I worked at an internet agency in a marketing context for Nivea. The focus was classically on marketing new products digitally for the German market – as an extension of large print and TV campaigns.

That changed as the brand became increasingly digitized and internationalized. Suddenly the focus was no longer on a single campaign for a single market, but on a harder question: How do you run a global brand coherently across all markets? The central project was called “Brand Internationalization,” and the hub for it was Nivea.com. To bring together the different markets, languages, and cultures, a custom Content Management System was developed.

This is exactly where something decisive began for me. I was convinced: the user experience of this CMS is just as important as the user experience of the website itself.

The common practice at the time was different. Tools behind the scenes were built according to a simple principle: It works. You can save, read, change. Questions about flow, ergonomics, or interface played no role. The more features were added – translations, further editorial functions – the longer the list of input fields simply grew. Nobody asked: What is actually the right path through this system?

Another project in the same context was brand management. If a global brand like Nivea is to be expressed consistently across markets – the same Nivea Blue, the same typeface, while accounting for cultural particularities like different writing systems or color semantics – you need structures that make this possible.

At the time, loose PDFs, printed guidelines, or occasionally a physical tin as a brand symbol were the usual tools. Charming, but hardly scalable. Together with the team, we developed the Nivea Brand Essentials: a digital tool for centralized brand asset management.

The goal was clear: What is the essence of the brand? Which building blocks need to be accessible and unambiguous enough to eliminate any uncertainty – what exactly is Nivea Blue, which logo is used when? Not a theoretical strategy document, but a practical toolkit. The different touchpoints – website, advertising, packaging – all shared a common core that this toolkit made available.

The users of this tool were neither the end consumers of the advertising nor the developers of the system. They were somewhere in between: people who produce packaging, websites, advertising, and local campaigns. An in-between space that hardly anyone was thinking about at the time.

My conviction was: if working with brand rules is pleasant, if people enjoy using the toolkit, good results follow. If nobody looks at the experience of these people – because it all happens behind the scenes – you are already playing yourself out of the game at the foundation.

A closer look at the Nivea Brand Essentials is available as a separate project.

A few years later, the same fundamental question appeared in a different context. At adidas, brand guidelines, downloadable assets, and identity tools were scattered across separate systems with separate logins. For employees working daily with the brand, and for agencies responsible for its expression across markets, the tools themselves were the obstacle.

The conception we developed proposed integrating a centralized Brand Identity platform directly into the adidas intranet. For employees, the extra login would disappear entirely. For external agencies, a single-entry extranet with role-based access scoped to the brands they worked with.

The key design principle was progressive disclosure: rather than exposing all assets upfront, the platform surfaces only what is contextually relevant. A logo download, for example, runs through a short contextual questionnaire, each answer revealing the next relevant parameter, until the download is ready. The implicit knowledge of what the right file is gets codified into the flow, not left to the user to figure out.

A closer look at the adidas Brand Identity Platform is available as a separate project.

The fourth example came somewhat later, in the context of Precious Design Studio in Hamburg, working with the brand management team at Otto.

For otto.de, a small team produced homepage teasers for product categories and campaigns. Highly manual, done in Photoshop, dependent on brand knowledge that lived in individual people. When those people weren’t available, quality suffered. Not because substitutes were less capable, but because the knowledge wasn’t written down anywhere.

The first iteration of what we called “Teasd” replaced this with a browser-based editor that had the brand rules already baked in: the Otto color palette, spacing, typography, storytelling structure. A designer opening the tool no longer needed to know the conventions – the tool enforced them by default. The implicit knowledge was now in the system, not in individual people.

The vision went a step further. Instead of a designer composing teasers one by one, the system would take a briefing and source material and generate multiple variants automatically. The designer’s role would shift entirely: not construction, not even composition, but curation and judgment. Select, refine, deploy as an A/B or multi-variant test. The path from briefing to production would collapse from hours to minutes.

It was never implemented. In retrospect, the concept arrived before the surrounding infrastructure, workflows, and organizational readiness could support it.

A closer look at Otto Teasd is available as a separate project.

All four examples reveal the same underlying question: What is the experience for the people who work behind or between the scenes, so that what happens in front of the curtain actually works?

This theme has stayed with me. The next logical step was working on a platform for small businesses – an operating system for restaurant owners and small retailers. Back of house is an established term in hospitality: the processes and people in the kitchen, the stockroom, the back office that ensure everything runs smoothly in the dining room. For twelve years I worked on exactly these questions: How can we better support the invisible work behind well-functioning experiences?

The UX behind the UX – this is not a niche concern. It is one of the most underestimated fields in design.