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.

Alexandra Leisse @ RuhrJS 2017 – Death by a thousand paper cuts

At RuhrJS 2017 UX designer Alexandra Leisse talked about her personal experience with designing user experience for enterprise applications and how to deal with the continually growing complexity involved in that process:

Sunday April 22nd, 2018 by Bjoern in Design, Enterprise Software, 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

Designer Lynx: Curated Links About Design

Designer Lynx is a curated collection of articles and other relevant resources such as design systems, icons, prototyping tools and software for designing user interfaces. Further categories include UI design inspiration and design topics such as colour and typography.

Sunday January 28th, 2018 by Bjoern in Design, Front End Development, Software, Web, Web Applications

Should Web Apps Behave More Like UNIX Programs?

Recently, through various discussions about the nature of the web and web applications I came up with an intriguing (to me at least ...) idea: Web apps should behave like UNIX command-line tools. Please hear me out and let me elaborate. Probably the most widespread pattern in modern web app development is that of single-page applications (SPAs). Though that particular term isn't used as abundantly anymore as it used to be a few years ago the design pattern it promoted still persists: Web apps ...

Sunday May 14th, 2017 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Front End Development, Mobile Applications, Software, Web, Web Applications

Codrops – Web design inspiration

Codrops is a blog that shares web design inspiration, trends and techniques. These days when thinking about your next web application's design it can be quite tempting to think "Ah, I'll just use Bootstrap and be done with that.". Although frameworks such a Bootstrap certainly aren't a bad start as they provide web apps with a common ground and predictable UI components - a minimum design standard if you will - they are just that: A start. In order to really help ...

Sunday May 7th, 2017 by Bjoern in Design, Web Applications

Design & Quantum Superposition

Last year, Hungarian designer Csongor Bartus published a thought-provoking article I've only recently come across. Quantum mechanics and design are two words you don't often see juxtaposed and probably rightfully so. No, I've not gone crazy and I'm not going to go down some weird esoteric "Quantum Design" rabbit hole here. However, Csongor borrows the term superposition from quantum mechanics as a metaphor for an interesting new angle on design for the web: To cut in, let's equip all content with all states ...

Sunday February 26th, 2017 by Bjoern in Design, Software, Web, Web Applications

RunKit: Instant, reproducible JavaScript playgrounds

I'm a huge proponent of the idea that programming tools should directly interact with coding and provide immediate, responsive feedback to changes. RunKit is such a tool that offers a comprehensive JavaScript / Node.js prototyping environment. The service supplies you with instant, sandboxed Node.js instances called "notebooks" that allow you to experiment with the whole gamut of NPM modules. Moreover, "from graphs and maps to low level hexadecimal inspectors" RunKit offers data visualisations for immediate visual feedback. Once done you can showcase your ...

Sunday February 12th, 2017 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Front End Development, Software, Web Applications

Interactive Flowcharts with code2flow

Visualisation often helps immensely when trying to understand complex systems and interactions. Visualising these systems and their behaviour can be a daunting task though: Covering each and every path a workflow or process might take can be quite arduous. In many cases it's not even possible to comprehensively describe a system that has not yet been implemented. Edge cases frequently only tend to surface once a software has been tried out under real conditions. Software in turn needs to adapt quickly, which all ...

Sunday December 18th, 2016 by Bjoern in Software

A Collection Of Common UX Myths

UX Myths is website on common UX misconceptions like "The homepage is your most important page", "You are like your users" or "Icons enhance usability". The authors shed light on where those myths come from, why they're wrong and what can be done to improve your design process in each case.

Sunday December 4th, 2016 by Bjoern in Design, Software

UI Movement

UI Movement is a website that showcases user interface designs on a daily basis as an inspiration for your own designs. The designs itself are mostly sourced from Dribbble - the show and tell site for designers. Originally just a newsletter in the vein of an MVP, UI Movement has developed into a fully-fledged website with designs organised in categories such as commerce, dashboard or menu.

Sunday October 23rd, 2016 by Bjoern in Design, Software

Björn Wilmsmann

my blog. for you.

Let’s talk digital.