A conversation with Dr. Nicolas Bissantz and Dr. Fabian Rossi about design, research, and data-driven decisions.
Design as part of analytical intelligence
Murat Suner: Nicolas, Fabian—congratulations on the German Design Award 2026. For DeltaApp, this is already the fourth major design award after the UX Design Award 2023, the London Design Award, and the French Design Award 2025. What does this accumulation of awards mean to you?
Nicolas Bissantz: Thank you. For us, this is actually more than a nice collection of trophies. The awards come from very different juries, from different countries and design cultures—Berlin, London, Paris, and now Frankfurt. All these panels independently say: This way of dealing with numbers is something special. It confirms a conviction we’ve held for many years: Excellent design isn’t a fig leaf over technology, but an integral component of analytical intelligence.
Fabian Rossi: For my team, it’s a real boost. We’ve been investing for years in something that’s sometimes hard to explain from the outside: perception-oriented design in a highly specialized business context. When a jury then writes that the “consistent reduction to essentials” creates an “impressively clear user experience” and elevates the interactive user experience to a new level, that’s a strong signal, also to our customers.
Why design matters in business intelligence
Murat Suner: Many people initially associate business intelligence and controlling with tables, charts, and Excel. Why does design play such a central role in this environment from your perspective?
Nicolas Bissantz: Because our brain is mercilessly limited. (laughs) When we started 30 years ago, our software looked like a textbook example of “more is more”—menus, tables, charts, numbers everywhere. It was functionally impressive, but visually, to put it mildly, not an award winner.
Through collaboration with renowned brain researcher Gerhard Roth, it became painfully clear to us: seeing is an illusion, thinking is expensive. Our working memory can only process a few units simultaneously. When we overload it with complex, colorful charts, we block precisely what we actually want—clear thinking with numbers.
That’s why we say today: In business intelligence, design determines whether a person gains knowledge from data or drowns in noise.
Fabian Rossi: And that’s precisely where DeltaApp comes in. We design numbers so they can be read like images. Typographically scaled digits, reduced color palette, sparse accents—all of this isn’t styling, but an answer to the limits of human perception. When you see a table and your eyes jump to the most important deviation without thinking, then design has fulfilled its purpose.
How numbers become readable
Murat Suner: The German Design Award jury particularly highlights the “consistent reduction to essentials,” color-marked trends, scaled digits, hierarchical gesture navigation, and concise sparklines. What’s conceptually behind this?
Fabian Rossi: Behind it are a few simple but hard principles. The first is: We start with the most important number. In many companies, people work through page-long reports. We’re initially interested in: What’s the one number that best describes the current state? For example, total revenue or results. From there, we drill down step by step in DeltaApp—segment, product group, customer.
The second principle is typographic scaling. We turn numbers into graphical elements by deliberately using size, weight, and form. The largest deviation literally yells at you without having to read every digit.
Third, we use color extremely sparingly. There are only two poles – blue and red – with graduated intensity. We don’t code categories with this, but relevance and direction: What works positively, what negatively toward my goal? This doesn’t create colorful dashboard fireworks, but a clear field of tension.
And fourth, we integrate sparklines as word-sized graphics directly into tables. You don’t just see how large a metric is, but also how it has behaved over time—in a tiny but meaningful trend pattern that can be read almost incidentally.
Nicolas Bissantz: I’d add what we call “haptic thinking.” We try to place the next thought at your fingertips through a gesture: tap, swipe, zoom. If I want to know what plus eight percent means in absolute values, I simply swipe over the number. If I want to switch from revenue to margin, I open the next level of the gross margin scheme with one finger.
For us, design means: Interaction follows the logic of thinking, not the other way around.
Perception, research, and decision pressure
Murat Suner: You often speak of universal laws of perception. How did these principles emerge, and how much research is in DeltaApp?
Nicolas Bissantz: A lot—and to some extent also biography. I come from research, earned my doctorate at one of Germany’s first AI institutes, and founded the company to bring these ideas into practice. Nevertheless, for a long time there were things in the BI world that felt wrong to me, like the famous traffic light logic with red-yellow-green. In theory that sounds nice, in practice it leads to information catastrophes through ambivalence.
At some point I didn’t want to just set gut feeling against best practice, but have hard evidence. So we worked with Gerhard Roth, with eye-tracking experiments, with top athletes like racing driver Hans-Joachim Stuck or referee Deniz Aytekin, with the German Sport University Cologne. We wanted to see how people see under high pressure, in the truest sense of the word.
From these studies and many projects with customers, rules emerged that are now in DeltaApp: How do I direct the gaze? How much can a person grasp at a glance? What belongs in the fovea, what in peripheral vision? Where the jury attests “outstanding design quality,” we look at many years of fundamental work.
Fabian Rossi: And we didn’t leave these fundamentals in the lab. We tested, discarded, and adapted them in hundreds of real analytics and controlling projects. Users get used to almost anything, even bad interfaces. A new interface must therefore be significantly better, otherwise no one will engage with it. This friction is part of our daily work.
Interaction follows thinking
Murat Suner: DeltaApp is described as a “mobile-first analytics platform” but also works on desktop and tablet. How does this shape the design?
Fabian Rossi: The smartphone was almost the natural starting point for us. Haptic gestures, limited space, high distraction—that’s the toughest school for clear design. If you can still navigate safely through complex corporate data on a small screen without legends, without a chart zoo, and without a maze of menus, then the concept works.
The big challenge was translation to desktop. There, people have different reflexes: right-click, context menu, keyboard shortcuts, multitasking. So we had to anchor our principles in two interaction cultures without diluting the visual grammar. Today you can experience the same number sense on all devices, just “touched” differently each time.
Nicolas Bissantz: And that’s strategically important for many companies. Data doesn’t belong in the IT basement, but in the everyday practice of executives and departments—in the office, on the go, in meetings. Consistent design across all devices is the prerequisite for analytical excellence to actually arrive in the organization.
Artificial intelligence needs clarity
Murat Suner: Another topic is artificial intelligence. How does AI fit into your design approach, and where do you draw boundaries?
Nicolas Bissantz: We’ve been enthusiastic about AI from the very beginning. Our very first award was actually for AI functionality, long before there were large language models. Today everyone talks about chatbots and natural language. That’s exciting, but in controlling there’s a hard truth: numbers must not be wrong.
We work with AI to recognize patterns, find anomalies, and generate explanations. But we’re extremely strict when it comes to numerical statements. Every recommendation, every automatically formulated message must be measured against the reality of the data. In this context, design also means: clearly showing what’s fact and what’s interpretation or suggestion.
Fabian Rossi: From a design perspective, AI is an additional sensory channel for us. We complement visual design with language, such as when a text field explains what’s happening in a table. The goal is for people not just to see data, but also to understand and remember it. But here too: clarity before magic.
Award and aspiration
Murat Suner: When you look at the big picture: To what extent is the German Design Award recognition for you—and to what extent a mandate?
Fabian Rossi: For me it’s both. Of course we’re pleased with the wording “elevated excellence of interactive user experience to a new level.” At the same time, there’s a promise in it to fulfill this claim in every new version and every new feature. Design in business intelligence is never finished because data, questions, and working methods are constantly changing.
Nicolas Bissantz: I see it similarly. The German Design Award, the UX Design Award, the awards from London and Paris together mark a differentiation we’re proud of. We’re not a software house that adds design later. We’re a research lab for better decisions that builds software.
If you will, each of these awards is a friendly reminder: to remain uncomfortable, to question charts, and to think from the human perspective. Because in the end it’s not about awards, but about a controller, a sales manager, or an executive thinking faster and more precisely in everyday work – with data that’s designed to be truly understandable.
