User Experience

Logging with Azure Application Insights – Part 1: Spring-Boot

| Daniel Bremer-Tonn

When developing and running apps inside Microsoft Azure you have to deal with the topics like monitoring and logging. Azure provides a central solution for that question which is Application Insights. AppInsights (for short) is the central hub to get metrics and log data from our applications and let you access these data within the azure portal in an easy and convenient way. While the metric aspect is well documented, how to connect your favorite application logger to AppInsights it is not.

In this blog post we will show you how to enhance your typical Spring-Boot application to have all the logging data send to Azure AppInsights automatically. In a followup post we will show the same for a typical nodejs based application.

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Adobe Experience Design – Review

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tl;dr? A summary and pros and cons list can be found at the end of this article plus some useful shortcuts.

The German version of this article is published here.

What is Adobe Experience Design?

It’s Adobe’s missing piece for rapid prototyping of interactive wireframes and simple sharing of those. Design some screens for your app, pull some arrows between them to define interaction, check your work in the preview mode, share the link and do a live demo directly on your phone. The workflow is surprisingly easy.

The tool is currently available for Mac only in version 0.5.2. It’s a preview, hence we will be lenient and wait for features like layers and scrollable boxes.

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Pick the right tools for remote usability testing

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remote-usability-tests

Usability tests in an agile world

Some months ago, we had the idea to develop a virtual UX lab that supports us in collecting user feedback on the fly as early as possible. First, we thought about a tool for unmoderated usability tests. Unfortunately, there was no tool that met our requirements. Most tools that do a great job (e.g., http://www.usabilitytools.com) are cloud-based solutions and require public access to the prototype. This is a no-go for our industrial clients that try to get a competitive advantage with the software we develop for them.
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ResponsiveLime – Making LimeSurvey responsive with Foundation

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LimeSurvey is a powerful tool that helps us to deliver questionnaires for User Experience evaluations or the survey for our annual akquinet Technology Radar. However, we were unhappy with the structure and styling of the survey, especially with the missing responsiveness for different screen sizes. LimeSurvey’s default templates build on a table layout and jQuery UI. Recently, we used the CSS framework Foundation and liked its fluid grid and the easy customization compared to Bootstrap. That is why, we chose Foundation to transform the template’s table structure into a responsive grid. For a detailed comparison of Bootstrap and Foundation that can help to make a choice based on the project’s requirements, see Gagan Naidu’s comparison of Bootstrap 3 vs Foundation 5. Continue reading →

akquinet Technology Radar 2013 available

| akquinet tech@spree

Just in time for the holidays here is the new Technology Radar 2013 🙂

Have a look: http://radar.spree.de/results

This year  the radar provides an overview of the trends for technologies, methods and tools in software development for 2013/2014. It is separated into 6 categories:

  • Methods
  • Platforms & Middleware
  • Databases
  • Frameworks & Libraries
  • Languages
  • Tools

Have a look for trends in 2014 and technologies to build on. You can download the radar: Technology Radar 2013 Print Version

Happy Holidays and a Happy New Year

akquinet AG

The state of web accessibility in the JavaEE world

| akquinet tech@spree

This post is intended to give an overview of the state of web accessibility (a11y) in general and within the JavaEE world in particular. The first section outlines the how and why of accessibility, followed by an introduction to web accessibility. The next section deals with common a11y problems in an average JSF web application. Finally, we summarize the current state of a11y in JavaEE. Continue reading →

The akquinet tech@spree Technology Radar is now available

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akquinet tech@spree has published a technology radar analyzing the trends of 2011–2012. It provides an overview of the evolution of practice in the Information Technology sector in 2011 as well as a forecast for 2012. It is the result of one year of analysis and synthesis performed by the Innovation department of akquinet tech@spree.

The technology radar captures the output from discussions, experiments, projects, and feedback from customers and developers. It synthesizes the results to inform global technology strategy decisions. It focuses on new technologies and methodologies with a high level of attraction. This document does not aim to provide an in-depth presentation of each technology, focusing instead on conciseness and highlighting the trends and state of the practice.

More information on http://radar.spree.de

Wireframe-Tools

| Nicole Charlier

[This is the english translation of the german article Wireframe-Tools]

Motivation: Reaching UI agility

One of the main goals of agile development is to improve the reaction to changes. Changing UI is expensive in term of time and resources. Indeed, UI changes do not only impact the UI layer, but may also require not planned features and architectural changes. To avoid too late changes, we propose, to our customers, prototypes of applications, tangible regarding interactions and UI design. Those prototypes are developed early in the development process, and so open discussion about the final UI.
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