About

A tinkerer and a problem solver.

Titles change. The core doesn't.

Developer, IT admin, photographer, marketer, product manager, designer. The job titles look like a zigzag. Underneath runs one line: I open things up to see how they work, then make them easier for the people who use them.

Phil Wornath smiling at his laptop

How I ended up in UX

  1. 2005 Junior developer

    It started with a BIOS jumper

    My parents set a BIOS password to limit my screen time, so I opened the case and bridged a jumper. Windows XP was too expensive, so I ran Linux on salvaged hardware. As a kid, a neighbour who ran a software company showed me C#. I built small games and walked them into every office in the building to watch people play.

    What I loved most wasn't the code. It was watching people use it.

    Phil as a toddler in a red T-shirt, next to an old beige PC

  2. 2010 IT admin · Webmaster · Photographer · IT consultant

    Fixing things for people

    IT admin at my school, websites for local businesses, photo jobs, then IT consulting. Many afternoons went to helping elderly neighbours with their digital lives, over coffee, cake and sometimes wine. Every printer that worked again felt like a win, and every time I wondered why it had been so hard in the first place.

    Instead of fixing problems one by one, I wanted to remove friction where it starts.

  3. 2015 Online marketing manager

    Learning to read what people do

    Online marketing at Performics taught me funnels, tests and numbers: what people actually do, not what they say they do. A bachelor's in Communications & UX Design gave a name to what I had been doing all along.

    Data doesn't replace talking to people. It tells you where to look.

    Black-and-white photo of Phil with a coffee cup in front of a city skyline at night

  4. 2020 UX designer · Data science

    Where it clicked

    A master's in Data-Driven Design at Utrecht University brought both halves together: research and data, design and code. As UX graduate at Toogethr I worked on an app that made the commute to the office easier and more social, my first product people used every day.

    Design is a hypothesis. The product in people's hands is the test.

    Phil on a Toogethr e-bike in front of an office building

  5. Since then Product manager · Product designer

    Everything that moves

    The car-obsessed kid ended up in mobility: product manager at Deutsche Bahn for the integration of bike and rail, then product design for SAP, Flasq, SmoothRide and Petset.

    In mobility, a confusing screen costs a missed train. That keeps you honest.

    Phil as a small child, asleep next to a red toy car

  6. 2025 UX engineer · Creative AI director

    Designing and building

    At Merkle / Dentsu, until August 2026, I built multi-brand design systems and AI-assisted prototypes for energy, FMCG, NGOs, mobility and finance. Today I work on my own: I design interfaces and build the systems that ship them.

    The fewer hand-offs between idea and product, the less gets lost on the way.

What stayed the same

  • Open the case

    I want to understand a system before I change it: the code, the process, the people around it.

  • Watch people use it

    Feedback beats opinion. I test early, with real people, and I'm happy to be wrong.

  • Fix it at the source

    A workaround helps one person once. A better system helps everyone who comes after.

In brief

Based in
Frankfurt am Main. Lived and worked in Berlin, Hamburg, The Hague, Utrecht and Valencia.
Education
MSc Data-Driven Design, Utrecht University · BA Communications & UX Design
Certifications
UXQB® · Accessibility Designer
Languages
German C2 · English C2 · Dutch B2 · Spanish A2
See the projectsDownload CV (PDF)The longer story in the garden