UX / UI Designer — Medical Tech · Semiconductor · Life Science

Hi, I'm Mario Barleben.
I design software that people can trust with their work.

Certified UX Designer with years of experience turning complex, high-stakes workflows — from ophthalmic surgery planning to semiconductor production — into interfaces clinicians, engineers and operators actually want to use.

See selected work Download CV
5+
years in UX/UI design
7+
shipped product lines
4
industries: medtech, semicon, life science, IT
01

About

I'm a certified UX Designer currently working across ZEISS business units — Meditec, SMT and Microscopy — designing interfaces for software that supports laser eye surgery, semiconductor manufacturing planning, and microscopy workflows. My work sits at the intersection of user research, interaction design, and design systems: I care as much about whether a workflow makes sense for a surgeon under time pressure as I do about whether a button follows the design system's spacing token.

I trained in Media Technology (M.Sc., TU Ilmenau) and have since built a practice around end-to-end UX: research and requirements elicitation, wireframing and prototyping, usability evaluation, and contributing production-ready components to design systems used across multiple product lines. I'm comfortable in cross-functional, multilingual agile teams and enjoy the parts of the job that are more "detective work" than "visual polish" — understanding why a workflow is painful before deciding how to fix it.

Right now I'm looking to bring that same user-centered, detail-oriented approach to teams working closer to product strategy and requirements — where UX research and business analysis meet.

Focus

User Experience Design, User Interface Design, Design Systems

Industries

Medical Technology, Semiconductor, Life Science & Pharma, IT

Education

M.Sc. Media Technology — TU Ilmenau, 2017

Certifications

  • Uxcel Professional Certification — UX Designer, UI Designer (2025)
  • Nielsen Norman Group Certificate in User Experience (2024)
  • UXQB® Certified Professional for Usability & UX — Foundation (2018)
  • ZEISS Expert Ladder R&D Innovation — Senior (2025)

Languages

German (native) · English (advanced)

02

Selected work

Most of my work is built for confidential, enterprise medical and industrial software, so details below are deliberately abstracted — no proprietary screens, patient data or internal tooling. Full walkthroughs with sanitized visuals are available on request.

Medical Technology · ZEISS Meditec

ZEISS ATLAS 500 — Anterior Segment Diagnostics

A diagnostic device application used to examine the eye's anterior segment: capturing patient data, acquiring diagnostics, and analyzing results in a single clinical workflow.

Challenge

Clinicians needed to move between patient records, live diagnostic capture, and analysis views quickly and without error, in a device used during real patient appointments where every extra click has a cost.

My role

End-to-end UX ownership: research with clinical stakeholders, information architecture, wireframing, prototyping, and usability evaluation across multiple release cycles.

Approach

Ran contextual inquiries and stakeholder interviews to map the real clinical workflow, restructured the information architecture around the patient journey rather than the underlying data model, and validated changes through usability testing before handoff to development.

Outcome

A workflow-first interface that reduced navigation overhead during patient appointments and became a reference point for later diagnostic device UIs at ZEISS Meditec.

Medical Technology · ZEISS Meditec

Refractive Laser Surgery — Workflow & Planning Successor

Design of the successor system for a refractive laser surgery platform, with enhanced workflow support and tighter integration between diagnostic and treatment-planning tools.

Challenge

Surgeons plan procedures across multiple diagnostic data sources; the previous generation of tooling required manual cross-referencing that introduced risk and slowed pre-operative planning.

My role

Led user-centered design activities — research, design, and evaluation — for the planning and workflow layer of the successor product.

Approach

Mapped the end-to-end surgical planning journey, identified where diagnostic and planning tools needed to talk to each other directly, and designed integrated views that removed manual data transcription steps.

Outcome

A more connected pre-operative workflow that reduced manual cross-checking between diagnostic and planning tools, feeding directly into ongoing platform development.

Semiconductor · ZEISS SMT

Supplier Risk Management — AI-Assisted Dashboard

A web interface to streamline supplier risk management, combining data visualization with AI-generated insights to support faster, better-informed decisions.

Challenge

Risk managers were working from rough, unstructured customer requirements and needed a way to scan large volumes of supplier data quickly while trusting AI-generated recommendations enough to act on them.

My role

UI design and data visualization concepting, translating rough business requirements into interface concepts built on the ZEISS "Beyond for Products" design system.

Approach

Designed visual hierarchies that surface risk signals at a glance, and treated AI-generated insights as a distinct, clearly-labeled layer so users could tell system-generated recommendations apart from source data.

Outcome

A scalable, design-system-based interface that turned an ambiguous set of customer ideas into a concrete, decision-support tool for supplier risk teams.

Life Science · ZEISS Microscopy

"Condensed" Library for the Beyond Design System

Co-creation of a condensed component library within the Beyond for Products design system, plus generic guidelines for a WPF component library built on design tokens.

Challenge

The redesign of a complex microscopy analysis interface needed a denser UI than the existing design system supported, without forking the system or breaking consistency across other products.

My role

Co-created the condensed component library in Figma and documented generic guidelines for implementing it as a WPF component library using design tokens.

Approach

Worked from real density constraints in the microscopy UI to define a condensed variant of existing components, then abstracted the result into token-based guidelines that development teams outside the original project could reuse.

Outcome

A reusable, documented library extension that let a data-dense scientific interface stay consistent with the broader ZEISS design system instead of diverging from it.

03

Skills & tools

UX / UI Concept & Design

  • Wireframing
  • Prototyping
  • UI Design
  • Style Guides
  • Design Systems
  • Information Architecture
  • Card Sorting
  • UX Writing
  • Data Visualization

Research & Evaluation

  • UX/UI Review
  • User Interviews
  • Observation & Contextual Inquiry
  • Personas
  • Usability Testing
  • Acceptance Testing
  • Heuristic Evaluation
  • Cognitive Walkthrough

Requirements & Agile

  • Mind Mapping
  • Stakeholder Management
  • Backlog Management & Prioritization
  • User Stories
  • Scrum
  • User Story Mapping
  • Kanban

Tools

  • Figma
  • Axure RP
  • Miro
  • Confluence
  • JIRA
  • Azure DevOps
  • Creative Cloud
  • SharePoint · Polarion

● Expert   ● Professional   ● Advanced

04

Let's talk

Open to conversations about UX roles — and about opportunities where UX research and design meet product ownership and business analysis. Full case study walkthroughs available on request.

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