Felix Hanser, M.A.

During my bachelor’s program in Media Studies and Sociology at the University of Tübingen, I completed several internships in the fields of journalism, computer game design, advertising, film production, and script development. Those internships helped me a great deal in deciding what career path I want to pursue and strengthened my decision to deepen my interests in media culture and media psychology in a master’s program.

In this regard, the master’s program in Media and Communication Studies at the University of Mannheim was just the right choice for me. In my master’s program, I was given the opportunity to acquire theoretical knowledge of media psychology and methods of media use research as well as to pursue my interest in social change through digital media.

At this time I had already decided my future career would be in the field of researching media use and its ergonomics. Back then, it was known under the terms “usability engineering”, “human factors engineering”, or “user research”. Social science methods are used in order to research the requirements that users place on an interactive product (e.g., a website or an app), as well as the quality of use as part of product design—the product-centric version of market research, so to speak.

Therefore, I also decided to complete a six-month research internship in the field of human-computer interaction in the “Data and Web Science” research group at the Mannheim School of Business Informatics during my master's program in Media and Communication Studies. During this internship, I conducted my first usability test and was given the opportunity to publish a research paper about it. Then, I occupied a working student position at the Fraunhofer Institute for Manufacturing Engineering and Automation IPA at the University Hospital Mannheim for two years. This way, I was able to familiarize myself with the profession of user experience researcher alongside my master’s degree. After I graduated, they took me over to work as an academic staff member in the software team of the project group for automation in medicine and biotechnology (PAMB). Altogether, I was a part of the Fraunhofer Institute in Mannheim for four years before transferring to Agilent Technologies, a laboratory equipment manufacturer in Karlsruhe. I worked there for two years as a user experience designer in the company’s internal design agency. Afterward, I was given the opportunity to occupy the position of user experience researcher at SAP in Walldorf, where I have been working to this day.