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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.

Good Interface Design: Consistency, Responsiveness & Feedback

Distinguished computer scientist Ben Shneiderman compiled this tremendously insightful as well as practically useful list of The Eight Golden Rules of Interface Design distilled from his experience and a vast corpus of user interface design with consistency being the first - and arguably most important - of these principles. More than 20 years ago, Joel Spolsky, of Stack Overflow, Microsoft Excel and Trello fame, also identified consistency as a fundamental principle of good UI design and argues for striving for an instantly ... Read more

Jeremy Keith – Declarative Design @ “Stories on the Road”

More on this idea: Design & Quantum Superposition Read more

7 Practical Design Tips

Some time ago, Adam Wathan & Steve Schoger of Tailwind CSS and Refactoring UI published this article with "7 Practical Tips for Cheating at Design". While I don't think that you can actually cheat at design, design being a skill that can and has to be learned, practiced, and honed like any other, pragmatic advice such as using colour and font weight for creating information hierarchy can help with achieving some quick wins and reaping the low-hanging fruit when it comes to ... Read more

A Collection of for a Improving the UX of Signup  and  Login Workflows

Independent UX designer Erik D. Kennedy recently published an article with 15 Tips for Better Signup / Login UX on Learn UI Design - a website through which he provides acclaimed courses on both UI and UX design. The article lists general suggestions such as autofocusing on the first field (i.e. the username, or rather: email, field), immediately validating form values, or making input labels clickable, as well as more specific - but no less expedient - ones like making password requirements explicit to ... Read more

Second-order Affordances: Design & Quantum Superposition

A few years ago, having read a thought-provoking article by Csongor Bartus I wrote about design & quantum superposition. The main idea behind this article, and my interpretation, is that - similar to a particle, which exists in a state of quantum superposition - a design doesn't exist by itself but can only ever be realised in a given context and at a specific moment through observation by a user and possibly a device that design is observed with. The gist, ... Read more

Material-UI Builder: Generating a React / Material-UI Codebase

Material-UI is a widely used UI component framework for React based on Google's Material Design design system. These frameworks and systems simplify and streamline the development of consistent user interfaces for web applications. Material-UI Builder is drag & drop online editor that allows you to choose from a wide range of Material-UI components for your application, customise the CSS styles applied to them, and export a ready-to-use codebase based on those preferences. Read more

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 ... Read more

Dan Abramov on The Elements of UI Engineering

Somewhat recently, Dan Abramov wrote this interesting piece on his approach to learning about UI engineering. The article's key takeaway is this: "My biggest learning breakthroughs weren’t about a particular technology. [ ... ] It’s this combination of understanding the problems, experimenting with the solutions, and applying different strategies that led to the most rewarding learning experiences in my life." In keeping with this wholistic, problem- rather than technology-oriented approach Dan starts with outlining the problems and challenges he has encountered repeatedly when developing ... Read more

Miriam Suzanne – Don’t Use My Grid System (Or Any Others) @ beyond tellerrand Düsseldorf 2018

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Keep it simple, stupid

As something of a follow-up on my article on using boring solutions from two weeks ago I'd like to point you to a blog post by Justin Etheredge, cofounder of software development company Simple Thread: Software Complexity Is Killing Us In this post Justin outlines in which ways software development has become easier in the past few decades and also points out the ways in which it hasn't. Most of the complexity of software applications accumulates in the layer that deals with business processes. ... Read more
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