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.

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 ...

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

Internal, company-specific software frameworks are evil

OK, I'm exaggerating a little here, company-specific software frameworks aren't exactly evil as in the true definition of the word but who isn't fond of the occasional hyperbolic headline? What I'm trying get across is that most of the times, software frameworks developed within an organization specifically for solving that organization's business problems in a reusable, maintainable manner do more harm than good. Everybody who's been exposed to enterprise software development for longer than a very brief period has come across them in ...

Sunday January 24th, 2016 by Bjoern in Design, Enterprise Software, Software

Anna Debenham @ Fronteers 2015: Front-end Style Guides

At last year's Fronteers Conference in Amsterdam freelance front-end developer Anna Debenham talked about front-end style guides. If you've ever heard about Pattern Lab and Atomic Design - which frankly you should've if your doing anything front-end on the web - this is what this talk is about: Anna Debenham - Front-end Style Guides from Fronteers on Vimeo. Anna presents the various kinds of style guides and style guide frameworks available and shows some real life examples of actual company style guides ...

Sunday January 17th, 2016 by Bjoern in Design, Front End Development, Web Applications

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

Rachel Nabors: Animating the User Experience

In this talk interaction developer and cartoonist Rachel Nabors explains the six components of motion design and how to apply those in order not to make your UI just flashy (or should I say "gaudy"?) but to actually create a better user experience and make use of animation to support your website's or application's intent:

Sunday November 1st, 2015 by Bjoern in Design, Front End Development, Web

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

beyond tellerrand 2015

Last week I attended beyond tellerrand 2015 in Düsseldorf. This year marked the fifth iteration of the event. It was once again a fantastic two days filled to the brim with a wide range of inspiring, insightful and technical talks about design. In the next few weeks I'll be posting more about some of the talks including live recordings as those become available. Until then I'll leave you with the marvellous opening titles for this year's conference, created by the Barcelona-based audiovisual ...

Sunday May 24th, 2015 by Bjoern in Design, Entrepreneurship, Web

Björn Wilmsmann

my blog. for you.

Let’s talk digital.