The Wiert Corner – irregular stream of stuff

Jeroen W. Pluimers on .NET, C#, Delphi, databases, and personal interests

  • My badges

  • Twitter Updates

  • My Flickr Stream

  • Pages

  • All categories

  • Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

    Join 1,839 other subscribers

Archive for the ‘User Experience (ux)’ Category

Digitale toegankelijkheid als waardevolle stresstest voor je architectuur: NLUUG voorjaarsconferentie, 7 mei 2026, Jorrit Geels over eenvoudigere ontwerpen, duidelijkere mentale modellen en beter onderhoudbare code.

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/04/29

Donderdag 7 mei 2026 geeft Jorrit Geels op de NLUUG voorjaarsconferentie in het Van der Valk Hotel Utrecht¹ een presentatie over eenvoudigere ontwerpen, duidelijkere mentale modellen en beter onderhoudbare code.

Hoe je dat krijgt? Zet digitale toegankelijkheid consequent op nummer 1, en de rest volgt.

Het resultaat? Je product wordt voor iedereen beter, waardoor alle gebruikers veel effectiever zijn en je boven je concurrentie uitstijgt.

Het programma staat hieronder², eerst de aankondiging van [Wayback/Archive] Vereniging NLUUG: “Toegankelijkheid wordt vaak ge…” – NLUUG Mastodon server:

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in accessibility (a11y), Awareness, Development, Inclusion / inclusive society, Software Development, User Experience (ux), Web Development | 3 Comments »

Google Sheets actually has a ton of Excel compatible functions; wish the User Experience was better though

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/04/14

I have been using Microsoft Excel since it beat the Quattro Pro limitation of rows and columns with the version 12.0, on Windows more commonly named Excel 2007 (which also introduced a fully new user experience including the vertical screen estate eating Ribbon – the main reason I like 16:10 monitors over 16:9 ones) and on Mac as Excel 2008.

It means I have like 20 years of Excel experience not just on what it can technically can do (see my Excel posts) but especially on the user experience bit.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Development, Excel, Google, GoogleDocs, GoogleSheets, Office, Office 2007, Power User, Software Development, User Experience (ux) | Tagged: | Leave a Comment »

Automation can’t fix broken security basics – Help Net Security

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/03/25

[WaybackSave/Archive] Automation can’t fix broken security basics – Help Net Security reveals nothing new: like in many places, automation isn’t the solution for bad processes or bad behaviour. Automation just assists getting things done (even in security), only marginally leading people to getting these things right in addition to done.

Leadership often focuses on broad resilience goals while the day-to-day work that supports them remains inconsistent and underfunded.

This is especially true when the day-to-day activities mainly consists clicking on links and other user-interface elements.

Yes, dark patterns are being used by adversaries, but a lot of day to day user experiences are based on dark patterns.

Improve those experiences by designing better processes amended by better automation, not the other way around.

Oh, and get your foundations right. For example by having processes in place that ease timely patching, even if that requires deployment on fridays.

--jeroen

Posted in Dark Pattern, Deployment, Development, DevOps, Infrastructure, Software Development, UI Design, User Experience (ux) | Leave a Comment »

Do not implement numeric input with like this Post NL user interface

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/01/14

I had to pick up a package keying in a 6 digit code using the below PostNL UI.

It was horrible. Don’t implement your numeric input UI like this: use a telephone keypad like or calculator numpad like keypad UI.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Development, Software Development, UI Design, User Experience (ux) | Leave a Comment »

30+ years of Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines from 1985 (and earlier Lisa / Apple II equivalents)

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/09/25

I hope someone has also archived all these in the Internet Archive as this is a great collection of historic material: [WaybackSave/Archive] GitHub – gingerbeardman/apple-human-interface-guidelines: Apple Human Interface Guidelines, et al.

If you have more of them: add them via a pull-request.

Related: [Wayback/Archive] Making It Macintosh: The Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines Companion : Apple : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

A client that went belly up in the early 1990s had all these and similar books. In retrospect, I though have found a way to obtain them but back then I didn’t value the uniqueness of them enough and didn’t have the storage space for it (I lived in a 30m² apartment).

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in //e, 68k, Apple, Apple Lisa, Classic Macintosh, Development, Hardware, History, Mac, NeXT, Power User, Software Development, User Experience (ux) | Leave a Comment »

I why I always use light mode: it’s easier on the eyes, as explained by Kristian Kohntopp

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/09/19

In a German thread, Kristian Köhntopp perfectly explained why I too always use light mode, so I put the English translations here:

  1. Dark mode is a strain on the eyes and useless.
  2. Specific: In darkness (and in dark mode) your pupils widen, the diaphragm opens. This reduces the depth of field and the eye muscles have to do more work and precision when focusing.
  3. Conversely, with light and a bright background you have a smaller pupil, a small aperture and more depth of field. This means that everything is automatically sharp, even if the eye has not readjusted.

The German thread:

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in accessibility (a11y), Conference Topics, Conferences, Development, Event, LifeHacker, User Experience (ux) | Leave a Comment »

“How come these shapes are so DIFFICULT??”

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/06/03

Cool video about how developers feel when others (like QA) test or use the software they have just built:

[Wayback/Archive] Devs watching QA test the product – YouTube

I got to the video via [Wayback/Archive] sanja zakovska 🌱 on Twitter: “Devs watching QA test the product… “ to which the author responded with

[Wayback/Archive] Alison Burke on Twitter: “@sanjazakovska Incase anyone needs the resolution 😂😂 follow me on tiktok! vm.tiktok.com/ZMJKeK29a

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Conference Topics, Conferences, Dark Pattern, Development, Event, Software Development, Testing, User Experience (ux) | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Rephrasing error messages into heulpful messages

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/04/15

The problem with error messages is that they just displays errors as a fact without providing the user of future steps.

Offer them with a helpful, actionable message instead.

Not just for people with a visual impairment, I added readable text to the image below.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in accessibility (a11y), Conference Topics, Conferences, Development, Event, Software Development, Usability, User Experience (ux) | Tagged: | Leave a Comment »

Unicode subscripts and superscripts: Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, and IPA tables; Source: Small caps: Unicode – Wikipedia

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/03/05

I originally searched for the tables below to see if I could get the visualisations of TeX and LaTeX right for infinite loop in “LaTeX: A Document Preparation System” by Leslie Lamport, printed in 1994..

Didn’t work, neither did using plain html super and subscript. The only thing that worked was using CSS styles (I chose to embed them, as separate CSS files are a huge premium over the WordPress plan), which also preserves actual meaning for screen readers:

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in accessibility (a11y), CSS, Development, HTML, Power User, Software Development, Unicode, URL Encoding, User Experience (ux), Web Development | Leave a Comment »

On accessibility (thanks Bianca Prins!) and archivability.

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/02/27

A long while ago, I participated in a Twitter thread that started with a translation of some important accessibility posts by Bianca Prins, then extended it to the concept to archivability:

[WayBack] Thread by @jpluimers: “I am going to first translate this, then extend this to archivability…. @jpluimers […]” #UXdesign #accessibility.

TL;DR

  1. make sure what you create is accessible
  2. ensure your (online) content is archivable
  3. help archiving content

Let’s go

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in ArchiveTeamWarrior, Conference Topics, Conferences, Development, Event, Internet, InternetArchive, Power User, Software Development, Usability, User Experience (ux), WayBack machine | Tagged: , , | Leave a Comment »