my blog. for you.

Let’s talk digital.

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.

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 ...

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 ...

Sunday July 11th, 2021 by Bjoern in Design, Enterprise Software, Front End Development, Software, Web Applications

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, ...

Sunday June 27th, 2021 by Bjoern in Design, Software, Web, Web Applications

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.

Sunday February 7th, 2021 by Bjoern in Front End Development, Software, Web Applications

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

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 ...

Sunday February 3rd, 2019 by Bjoern in Design, Front End Development, Software, Web Applications

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

Sunday July 29th, 2018 by Bjoern in Design, Front End Development, Software, Web Applications

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. ...

Sunday June 10th, 2018 by Bjoern in Business, Enterprise Software, Software

Fitts’ Law

One of the quintessential laws of human-computer interaction (HCI) and by extension software user experience is Fitt's Law, which states that the time required to rapidly move to a target area is a function of the ratio between the distance to the target and the width of the target. The most common application of this law these days can be paraphrased as "The wider an object is on the screen and the closer it is to the mouse pointer the easier it is ...

Sunday June 3rd, 2018 by Bjoern in Design, Front End Development, Software, Web Applications

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 ...

Sunday February 11th, 2018 by Bjoern in Design, Software

Björn Wilmsmann

my blog. for you.

Let’s talk digital.