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I’m an independent IT consultant and entrepreneur in the Internet and software business. I’m interested in design, enterprise applications, web apps and SaaS products. I design and develop business solutions and applications. I help companies in terms of software quality and knowledge transfer, e.g. with Angular and Spring Boot.

The Laws of UX

For a discipline that's commonly seen as being mostly fuelled by creativity rather than being particularly rule-governed, principles, maxims, and laws seem to abound in the world of design. This perception of design being about creativity, first and foremost, rather than deliberate thought is a naïve and superficial one, though. Design of course has always been about principles and constraints, Dieter Rams' famous Ten principles for good design being a particularly good example. UX designer Jon Yablonski created Laws of UX, where he ...

Objectified – A Documentary About Industrial Design

Objectified, the second part of Gary Hustwit's Design Trilogy, deals with industrial design and examines the design of everyday objects and the life and work of the people that design them. Just like Helvetica, the first part of the trilogy, the film is largely done in an interview format and features conversations with highly acclaimed industrial designers such as Jonathan Ive, IDEO co-founder Bill Moggridge, and the legendary Dieter Rams.

Sunday October 25th, 2020 by Bjoern in Design

Helvetica – A Documentary About a Typeface

Helvetica by director Gary Hustwit is a documentary film about the eponymous Helvetica typeface and typography and visual design in general. Using Helvetica's simple elegance, usefulness, and ubiquity as both a starting point and a recurring theme, this documentary film features interviews with many design and typography legends and luminaries such as Jonathan Hoefler, Erik Spiekermann, or Tobias Frere-Jones. In those interviews, those typographers share their opinions on what made Helvetica so wildly successful, why it is the iconic typeface of the modern ...

Sunday October 18th, 2020 by Bjoern in Design

Improving Developer UX

Software engineer and data scientist Gabriel Pickard recently has published an article about developer experience being fundamentally harder than normal UX. He defines developer experience as the user experience of the tools software developers use in order to do their job: code editors IDEs command-line tools Gabriel identifies these main aspects in which in his opinion developer tools are failing their users: Counter to any UI/UX philosophy, as programmers we find ourselves maintaining vast background knowledge about the structure and dynamics of our programs, with nary a ...

Sunday April 26th, 2020 by Bjoern in Design, Software

Reprise: Petro Salema – Storyteller Extraordinaire

Almost five years ago I wrote about a talk given by Petro Salema at that year's edition of beyond tellerrand in Düsseldorf: Petro Salema – Designing Interfaces That Think @ beyond tellerrand Düssedorf 2015 A common advice given regarding talks and presentations, especially ones of a more technical variety, is to not just talk about technical details but to tell a story. While this piece of advice is good and well-intentioned it's not usually exemplified or specified in any more detail. Steve Jobs is ...

Sunday April 12th, 2020 by Bjoern in Design, Entrepreneurship, Mobile Applications, Software, Web, Web Applications

Ashi Krishnan @ Fronteers 2019: Learning From Machines

Ashi Krishnan - Learning From Machines from Fronteers on Vimeo.

Sunday January 19th, 2020 by Bjoern in Design, Software

“Accessible HTML Content Patterns” by Eric Bailey

Accessibility, though unfortunately often still treated as an afterthought, is a key part of developing and providing software products, web applications in particular. Accessibility, mark you, isn't just an enabler for those with special needs, although that's sufficient reason for paying attention to your web apps being accessible. Accessibility also is about designing products and processes to be accessible regardless of the device they're used on, the circumstance they're used in and the people they're used by. In that vein, designer Eric Bailey ...

Sunday November 3rd, 2019 by Bjoern in Design, Enterprise Software, Software, Web Applications

Björn Wilmsmann