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.

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

User Experience Design Methods & Deliverables

As I previously wrote about, design and user experience (UX) design are disciplines defined and governed by rules, principles, and constraints. The highly recommended Laws of UX provides an in-depth overview of principles and best practices in UX design. Coming from a slightly more hands-on perspective, designer Fabricio Teixeira compiled a comprehensive list of UX design methods & deliverables such as service blueprints, personas, or user journeys. 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

Five Articles on Software Quality and Design Patterns

This week I'd like to point you to five articles I previously posted on this blog and from which I think that they're as relevant as they were at the time. The first three are about general software design principles, software architecture and software quality while the final two refer to specific best practices and common design patterns for Angular: Writing Disposable Code, Not Reusable Code (November 06, 2016) What Causes Over-engineering and How Can You Prevent It? (April 16, 2017) Less Is More ... Read more

The Laws of UX

For a discipline that's commonly seen as being mostly fuelled by creativity rather than being particularly rule-governed, principles, maxims, and laws seem to abound in the world of design. This perception of design being about creativity, first and foremost, rather than deliberate thought is a naïve and superficial one, though. Design of course has always been about principles and constraints, Dieter Rams' famous Ten principles for good design being a particularly good example. UX designer Jon Yablonski created Laws of UX, where he ... Read more

Improving Developer UX

Software engineer and data scientist Gabriel Pickard recently has published an article about developer experience being fundamentally harder than normal UX. He defines developer experience as the user experience of the tools software developers use in order to do their job: code editors IDEs command-line tools Gabriel identifies these main aspects in which in his opinion developer tools are failing their users: Counter to any UI/UX philosophy, as programmers we find ourselves maintaining vast background knowledge about the structure and dynamics of our programs, with nary a ... 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

“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
Next Page »