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.

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 ...

Jenny Shen: UX Design Across Different Cultures

UX designer Jenny Shen recently has been featured on the Scott Hanselman's podcast with her work on UX design across different cultures. She's published a two-part summary of her experiences with cross-cultural design and internationalization (i18n) and localization (l10n) of websites and applications: UX Design Across Different Cultures — Part 1 UX Design Across Different Cultures — Part 2 These articles shed light on how distributing an application or publishing a website in another country not only requires translating the content and labels of UI elements but also has ...

Sunday November 18th, 2018 by Bjoern in Design, Web, Web Applications

Bret Victor: The Future of Programming

Bret Victor - The Future of Programming from Bret Victor on Vimeo.

Sunday September 16th, 2018 by Bjoern in Design, Software, Web

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

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

Paul Verbeek-Mas @ RuhrJS 2017 – Calendar / Kalender / تقويم (aka, the fun of locali[zs]ation)

At RuhrJS 2017 Paul Verbeek-Mas gave an interesting talk on the joys and intricacies of i18n and l10n with regard to how time, dates and calendars are rendered in web apps:

Sunday January 7th, 2018 by Bjoern in Design, Front End Development, Software, Web Applications

Jina Anne @ beyond tellerrand 2017 – Design Systems: Real Talk

Jina Anne @ beyond tellerrand 2017: Design Systems: Real Talk from beyond tellerrand on Vimeo.

Sunday June 25th, 2017 by Bjoern in Design, Web

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

Björn Wilmsmann

my blog. for you.

Let’s talk digital.