R.Gerstl

CV
Hello there 👋
What do you want to learn about me today?
Who are you?
Hello! 👋 I'm Ricardo Gerstl, a Senior UX Designer/Researcher based in Zurich.
What do you design?
I design for people whose livelihood runs through the product. Not delight for its own sake, but clarity in complex systems.
Where have you worked?
At , , and I led UX strategy across teams, owning both the research that points the way and the interaction detail that delivers it.
How do you work?
I’m comfortable in ambiguity, curious by nature, and grounded in research. I bring engineering in early, turn insights into clear design decisions, and make the case for design through business value and technical feasibility.

12+ years building products.

What I've worked on

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AI Native UX Workflow

Design-system rules, component contracts, and live UX research delivered where developers code, before decisions drift into a PR.

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Knowledge Base

A centralized, AI-powered knowledge base for AWS. Led end-to-end design and research that reshaped how teams decide together.

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Page Templates

Hitachi Energy editors stopped starting from a blank canvas. Templates cut page build time and gave readers a consistent structure.

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Videocall App

Berst went mobile-ready in four weeks: one responsive web app, three streams aligned, and a desktop-first tool remade for phones.

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Design System

Appway’s shared patterns, components, and docs so client UIs could scale on a configuration-driven foundation, and open the door to AI-driven UI later.

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Interactive Elements

Clearer affordance on links and interactive components helped people go deeper, lifting third-level page visits by 40%+ in many cases.

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Case Studies Revamp

Scattered project stories became one case-study system with filters, tags, and writing guidelines.

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TL;DR

2025–present

The handoff didn’t need to be faster. It needed to disappear.

  • 4 knowledge sources
  • 8 workflow stages
  • Straight to code UX guidance

Under NDA; wireframes are mockups.

The problem
Component purpose, data requirements, research findings and open questions lived in tickets, Figma, Slack and scattered docs, nowhere a developer could reach while building. So the UI shipped looking right and meaning the wrong thing.
What we did
Turned component contracts, design-system rules, research insights and open questions into a live knowledge layer the coding agent consults while a developer builds, so UX guidance arrives at the point of implementation, not after the PR.

Research

  • Weekly user interviews
  • Usability testing on prototypes
  • AI tool usage analytics
  • Research ops (questions, sessions, insights)

Tools

  • Notion over MCP
  • Figma over MCP
  • IDE coding agent

Team

Three people (Ricardo, a Product Manager and 1 frontender) inside a product team of about twelve spanning product, engineering, compliance, customer success and sales.

TL;DR

2022–2024

From disconnected emails to one source of truth.

  • 3 mo MVP launched
  • more data logged
  • ≈100M$ yearly savings

Under NDA; wireframes are mockups.

The problem
Several teams gathered the same operational data their own way, in spreadsheets emailed around every week, so nobody could tell what was current, who owned a change, or how a decision had been informed.
What we did
Built one multi-module knowledge base where every module shares the same patterns for collection, collaborative maintenance and reporting, with records that carry their own provenance, and an assistant that suggests but never writes a field.

Research

  • User interviews (worldwide sampling)
  • Diary studies
  • Task-based interviews
  • Usability testing
  • Usage analytics
  • Accessibility reviews

Tools

  • Amazon Q
  • AWS design system

Team

Ricardo with a Product Owner, a Tech Lead, 1 Senior Product Designer, 7 front/backend engineers and 3 business/data analysts. Team lead for 8 consultants, 16 in rotation.

TL;DR

2020–2022

Editors stopped reinventing the page.

  • 90→50 min to build a page
  • 24+ page templates
  • No blank canvas editor start state
The problem
Every page started from a white canvas, so each editor invented their own layout, and with it hidden content in tabs, misused tables and missing headings.
What we did
Replaced the blank canvas with topic templates built from mandatory and optional zones, then ran the training and release communications that kept 220+ editors on one model through two rebrands.

Research

  • Internal user interviews
  • Surveys & questionnaires
  • Content analysis
  • Usability testing
  • Accessibility reviews

Team

Ricardo plus 300+ content owners and web editors, 220+ of them aligned on one content strategy, working alongside the design team, branding and the communications departments.

iMessage
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In the spirit of reconciliation, I, Ricardo Gerstl, acknowledge the Traditional Custodians of country throughout Australia and their connections to land, sea and community. I pay my respect to their Elders past and present and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples today.

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