Are personas really useful and are people in the team going to use them? Some thoughts on one of the most overrated design fads. Article written in September 2013. In my experience as a user experience designer, personas are largely overrated, and might not bring the benefits that are expected…

A review of Axure and other common UX tools. This is an old article that I decided to re-publish here for archiving purposes. === Update July 2017 === An updated, and much more detailed tutorial on this topic was in the plans, but eventually it never happened, despite months of…

Visual design and interaction design are strictly connected disciplines. A professional user interface designer should be able to deal with both confidently. Written in September 2013. I would like to mention some brilliant examples from Bred Victor’s site that show how a well structured information graphics can help reduce the…

An issue I’ve experienced with Google My Maps, and thoughts on how poor the response from the app owners was. Article written in July 2019. A very established design guideline is that software should be “considerate” (as Alan Cooper would put it), and never waste people’s time; interfaces should prevent…

Today’s web technology doesn’t easily allow to export HTML content as PDF. This is a basic piece of functionality that one would expect to work seamlessly, but unfortunately, it is not the case. The article was written in December 2019. I regularly export locally, on my machine, web pages and…

Unfreundliche Vertragsklauseln, Gehirnwäsche durch Marketing und fragwürdige Übungen für das Krafttraining, die mehr Schaden anrichten als sie nützen. Es ist an der Zeit, ein paar Vorschriften einzuführen und Fitnessunternehmen daran zu hindern, ihre Kunden mit mangelndem Respekt zu behandeln. Kieser Training: hoher Preis und unangemesse Vertragsklauseln Als ich damals einen Einjahresvertrag bei Kieser Training unterschrieb, wusste ich…

It’s fine to protect customers from illicit activity, as long as you don’t end up protecting them from themselves, and creating lots of unwanted friction in their workflows. I’ve been dealing with the customer support of PayPal Germany today, as I was experiencing problems logging in to my account, and…

You can’t read news articles in peace anymore. Nowadays, one in two websites is going to throw a newsletter sign-up module at you before you even start reading the first paragraph— want access to this article that you find so interesting? Sign up here first, just a matter of seconds…

Unfair contract terms, marketing brainwashing, and questionable strength training exercises that might do more harm than good. While we need better regulations to prevent fitness companies from doing what they want with their customers, we can also defend ourselves by knowing how they lure us into trusting them. Contract terms against customers When I…