MDM Münzhandelsgesellschaft
01 - The Brief
A design system that couldn't be built
I was hired to scale a design system. Within five months that brief had dissolved — the engineering team had been reduced to firefighting, nothing new could be shipped, and a possible Shopify migration was making the existing system potentially redundant. I am the sole designer in an organisation with no established UX or CX practice, fragmented ownership of the experience, during a period of strategic uncertainty.
Rather than wait for the situation to resolve, I redirected toward the most useful thing I could actually do: understand what was happening with the business and its customers before anyone decided what to build next.
SCOPE - Professional / MDM & Richard Borek Unternehmensgruppe
TOOLS - Figma, Miro, GA4, Econda, AB Tasty
ROLE - CX Strategy, Service Design, User Research, Experimentation Framework, Stakeholder Management
Timeframe - 2025 to ongoing
02 - The Signals
The data was incomplete. The picture was still clear.
Analytics data was partial due to high cookie consent rejection. A second platform used business-specific KPI definitions that made interpretation difficult. Rather than wait for clean data, I triangulated across sources - being explicit about what I knew, what I was assuming, and where the gaps were.
Revenue was holding — but only because precious metals prices had risen consistently. Underneath a stable revenue line, the business's ability to convert interest into sales had been quietly eroding. The risk was being masked by an external market factor.
Conversion Rate — 2024 to 2025
-22%
Relative Drop
Conversion rate was down — The number of visitors were up year on year but the site wasn't converting them. That's not a reach problem. It's an experience problem.
03 - Customer Understanding
⚠ Echo chamber effect: as dissatisfied customers stopped responding, the pool skewed toward loyal regulars. The improving NPS score was masking a disengaging customer base — not reflecting a genuinely improving experience. Decisions based on this score alone would be systematically misleading.
Built from scratch using what existed.
No research infrastructure. No interviews. No usability testing programme. Using a 2020 customer survey alongside competitive research, I developed working customer profiles — with the assumption that the survey would be valid for 5 years and explicitly framed as informed hypotheses, not definitive answers. These gave me a reference point for decisions.
