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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.

“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 ... Read more

The Magical Number Seven

This article by designer Jeff Davidson is an informative reminder of the well-known observation that human working memory has a capacity of 7 items (give or take 1 or 2). This observation, originally posited by cognitive psychologist George A. Miller in his paper The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two is a crucial guideline for designing user interfaces. If a user interface contains more than that number of different chunks of information it'll appear cluttered and overloaded to the user, who will ... Read more

Less Is More

What's true for design in general certainly is true for software design in particular: Less is more - or paraphrasing Dieter Rams - "Write less software in order to write better software." A few weeks ago I read this interesting article by web accessibility consultant Heydon Pickering. In this blog post he argues that the only foolproof way of writing performant web applications is to write less code. Sure, all that fancy minification, transpiling, JIT / AoT compilation and optimisation stuff might ... Read more

Dropdown menus and alternative approaches for selecting from a choice of options

In this post designer Luke Wroblewski outlines why dropdowns should be the UI of last resort. The problem with dropdown menus - also known as select boxes in HTML lingo - is that they're something of a general purpose, one-size-fits all solution for dealing with lists of elements. Although dropdown menus accommodate most list-based use cases using them often doesn't take the specifics of the use case at hand into consideration. As pointed out by Luke most of the times other, more ... Read more