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Ask HN: Good resources for programmers to learn about UX/design?

• dhzhzjsbevs 4y ago
  For usability, "don't make me think" is gospel. https://www.amazon.com.au/Dont-Make-Think-Revisited-Usability/dp/0321965515/ https://www.amazon.com.au/Dont-Make-Think-Revisited-Usabilit... For design itself I'm just not that way inclined and use existing frameworks instead.
• ljoshua 4y ago
  Refactoring UI (https://www.refactoringui.com https://www.refactoringui.com) is a fantastic resource, and we’ll worth the price in my opinion. I refer to it again and again. You can also find videos on YouTube of the author doing “live” UI redesigns/refactorings, and those are also very useful.
  • soulofmischief 4y ago
    Is this book the reason I see such bad UX trends across the web? In many of the visual examples, the recommended approach looks worse than the criticized approach, and in some cases is much less parsable. A phrase like "Use more whitespace" isn't some simple-yet-woke millennial web mantra, it's just crappy advice, too vague to be useful and vague enough to be harmful. Truly, some of these examples are the antithesis to good design. The chapters of the book seem highly opinionated and forcing a particular set of (unvalidated) opinions upon me instead of generalized, objectively applicable tools.
    • akprasad 4y ago
      Do you have a resource you recommend instead?
    • ljoshua 4y ago
      Agreed that it is quite opinionated, and shouldn't be taken for gospel. But I think it's a very good resource for those that are coming from no design background at all and need some strong principles to guide them at the beginning. Many an engineer-designed page or screen would have benefited from some of the basic principles here, including "use more whitespace."
    • dhzhzjsbevs 4y ago
      I love that the first example suggesting fewer borders looks worse and more confusing than the one they're suggesting not to use.
      • soulofmischief 4y ago
        Yeah, that really stuck out to me as just awful design. Completely unparsable.
  • zo1 4y ago
    Is it just me, or does the first example in that link, the contact search + list form, look much better in the way that the book says is the "Wrong way"?
  • SebastianKra 4y ago
    +1 for Refactoring Design. The designs it presents are okay. But it highlights many of the considerations and techniques you can use to find your style. Also, as a rule, don't listen to HN for design opinions. Many people here talk about design like a bad programmer talks about principles: "Always have 100% unit test coverage" or "Functions should never be longer than 7 lines". My recent favorite was when an article introduced an unusual, award-winning checkbox design for a very specific use-case, and a number of comments completely missed the context [1]. ^[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31783841 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31783841
• kristiandupont 4y ago
  Adam and Steve (of TailwindCSS fame) have some valuable resources. I have purchased both TailwindUI and Refactoring UI: https://www.refactoringui.com/ https://www.refactoringui.com/, both of which I can highly recommend besides from their many free youtube videos.
• oumua_don17 4y ago
  These are expensive but fantastic more than worth the cost courses. [1] [2] [1] https://learnui.design/ https://learnui.design/ [2] https://learnui.design/courses/learn-ux-design.html https://learnui.design/courses/learn-ux-design.html
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• QuadmasterXLII 4y ago
  I enjoyed Gwern's "Design of this website" https://www.gwern.net/Design https://www.gwern.net/Design
• Adrig 4y ago
  My go-to resource is the NN Group (https://www.nngroup.com/ https://www.nngroup.com/). One of the most serious publication that tries to back up insights with actual data. Then there are the publications from people in the industry that can be interesting, but that's case by case. You'll have better results for specific problems like building and maintaining a design system. You also have the UX collective (http://uxdesign.cc/ http://uxdesign.cc/) but their articles are hit or miss. Good ones at least provide references for you to explore deeper.
• lioeters 4y ago
  Design Systems Repo - A frequently updated collection of Design System examples, articles, tools and talks https://designsystemsrepo.com/ https://designsystemsrepo.com/ Awesome Design Systems https://github.com/alexpate/awesome-design-systems https://github.com/alexpate/awesome-design-systems
• Leftium 4y ago
  Making UX that feels good to use: https://www.udemy.com/course/ultimate-guide-to-ux/ https://www.udemy.com/course/ultimate-guide-to-ux/ Making UI that looks good (at least decent): https://getbootstrap.com/docs/5.2/examples/ https://getbootstrap.com/docs/5.2/examples/
• dccoolgai 4y ago
  First: UX is not visual design and visual design is not UX. Industry tends to blur them ("oh this person does Photoshop so we'll make them in charge of UX"). If you want to learn design, I'm less sure of what to recommend outside of "read a lot about Dieter Rams". For UX, read Nielsen Norman and Dr. Weinschenks book "100 things every designer needs to know about humans".