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.

Explorable Explanations And A Reactive Document IDE

It's no secret I'm a fan of Bret Victor's work and the notion that programming tools should interact with coding and provide immediate, responsive feedback to changes. Recently, I've come across two intriguing projects / products that both draw upon this idea: Carbide (currently available as an early alpha version) is a new kind of JavaScript IDE that both immediately visualises the result of code changes and allows you to manipulate and visually interact with your code using UI controls such as sliders. Explorable ...

Cracking the Code – David Jonathan Ross

At this year's beyond tellerrand typeface designer David Jonathan Ross gave an interesting talk about the typography of programming, including its history and the design rationale behind monospace fonts, in his own words hitting the sweet spot that is the nerd trifecta of history, programming and fonts: Cracking the Code - David Jonathan Ross - btconfDUS 2016 from beyond tellerrand on Vimeo. The talk contains a lot of intriguing insights into why programming fonts are designed the way they are, what UX ...

Sunday July 24th, 2016 by Bjoern in Design, Software

Why motion matters in UI design

UI designer Craig Dehner wrote this interesting article about why he thinks motion design is the future. I wouldn't necessarily use such grandiose terms but essentially I agree: Motion design might not be THE future but it'll certainly play a vital role in current and future user interfaces. It took operating systems and browsers some time to be able to display smooth, seemingly natural animation (using CSS3 animations in the latter case). Now that animation is a staple of modern UI frameworks and ...

Sunday May 8th, 2016 by Bjoern in Design, Front End Development, Mobile Applications, Web Applications

A design rationale for Tube stations

In December 2015, Transport for London published the London Underground Station Design Idiom - design and user experience guidelines for London Underground stations, if you will. Ranging from their consistent usage of the Johnston typeface, to the iconic roundel and - of course - the equally iconic Tube map, which constitutes a design feat in its own right, TfL always had a strong foundation in design thinking. London Underground stations from very different eras and styles - Victorian, Art Deco, as well as ...

Sunday May 1st, 2016 by Bjoern in Design

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 ...

Sunday April 24th, 2016 by Bjoern in Design, Web Applications

UI Design Patterns

UI Patterns is an extensive library of user interface design patterns by Danish web developer Anders Toxboe. This website is a collection of tried-and-tested best practices in UI design. Although the site focusses on web applications and websites most of its practices apply to user-facing software in general. Best practices and design patterns allow us to draw upon proven methods - of user interaction in this case - instead of having to re-invent the wheel (which itself is an anti-pattern) each ...

Sunday March 20th, 2016 by Bjoern in Design, Software, Web Applications

LOAD”*”,8,1

Last week, I met with a few friends for an evening of 80s retro computing - or retro gaming to be specific. We set up an Amiga 500 and a C64 and played classic games like Lotus Esprit Turbo Challenge, Dynablaster, Sensible Soccer, California Games and International Karate. It was great fun. Retro gaming of course is a lot about nostalgia but there's also something about many of these games that hasn't been achieved in many modern video games anymore: Instead of ...

Sunday March 13th, 2016 by Bjoern in Design, Software, Web

Enterprise UX: Huge Potential And Anything But Boring

Last year designer Uday Gajendar wrote this interesting post about why he designs enterprise UX suggesting more designers should follow suit. This is pretty much in the vein of another article by fellow designer Dave Malouf. I very much agree with this point of view. User experience in enterprise software generally has a huge potential for improvements that impact thousands of users in a meaningful way. Yes, enterprise software often isn't exactly nice to look at, cumbersome to use and generally not ...

Sunday February 14th, 2016 by Bjoern in Design, Enterprise Software

Zoltan Kollin: Misused mobile UX patterns

Zoltan Kollin, UX designer, co-organizer of the Amuse UX Conference and co-author of UX Myths (another highly recommendable collection of user experience tips and guidelines) recently wrote a post about misused mobile UX patterns. We've seen it all on the mobile platform of our choice: icons whose meaning is hard to guess the dreaded hamburger menu and hidden screens inconsistent gestures and features that are hidden behind them Zoltan mentions those and a few more bad practices, explains why they're bad and gives examples of better ...

Sunday December 20th, 2015 by Bjoern in Design, Front End Development, Mobile Applications, Web Applications

Petro Salema – Designing Interfaces That Think @ beyond tellerrand Düssedorf 2015

Earlier this year at beyond tellerrand Düsseldorf 2015 I had the privilege to attend a talk by Petro Salema. Petro shared his insights about today's limits in human computer interaction, attention span, mental bandwidth and how to address these issues. While the subject matter itself is interesting enough already I've never personally witnessed such rivetting storytelling before. He started his talk with a captivating story from his home country Tanzania about Bwakila, a machete-wielding madmen. This story nicely set the ground for the ...

Sunday August 16th, 2015 by Bjoern in Design, Entrepreneurship, Mobile Applications, Software, Web, Web Applications

Björn Wilmsmann

my blog. for you.

Let’s talk digital.