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Ask HN: How did you increase your UX skills?

254 points by staticBr 4y ago

Hi HN, as a Software-Developer, I'm looking for resources that could help to raise my understanding of UX design. So a simple question: What helped you increase your UX skills?

qualudeheart 4y ago
Coursera has some good courses.
rad_gruchalski 4y ago
When I worked for a company selling aircraft spares, I was talking to my users every day. Everyone: from MD, though the call center, all the way to the warehouse. Seeing how they want to work and listening to what issues they had helped me "get into their shoes", thus make the software work the way they wanted it to work.
1autodev 4y ago
[dead]
blackRust 4y ago
Personally, I found this book very useful and straightforward. It is written by the creators of Tailwind CSS. https://www.refactoringui.com https://www.refactoringui.com
- Anaminus 4y ago
  This one amuses me. You skip the long-windedness of the front page to look at the pictures. Your eyes are caught by two example user interfaces: contact forms. The one on the left looks great. The one on the right looks awful. Yet it's the one on the left that has the big red X next to it. So you backtrack to read why they're wrong. The reason is because borders "feel" busy and cluttered. Nothing empirical. No data to back it up. Just "feelings". This led me to believe the whole website/book is going to be like this, so I haven't read any further. I'm sure it's great.
  - boloust 4y ago
    > The one on the left looks great. The one on the right looks awful. This is also just a mere assertion of "feelings", with nothing empirical and no data to back it up. As long as those are the rules we're playing by, I'll say that to me, the design on the left screams "designed by a dev", in the pejorative sense, while the one on the right looks like it had a designer involved. Whether there are actual usability improvements is an orthogonal issue, but I don't feel there's a huge gap between the two. I feel a lot of this comes down to trends, rather than actual usability. Keeping up with the latest trends in UI design is a signal that you care enough about design and UX to employ and empower a designer/ design team. Paradoxically, sometimes signalling you care about design might involve making the UX worse (relative to what the user base is trained on), if that's what the trends dictate. For example, the sudden overcompensated reaction against skeumorphism that was "flat design". Just some of my feelings.
game_the0ry 4y ago
Call me stupid, but I just pick a really good css framework and either try to copy and / or learn from it. Tech companies with great engineers and designers have given away these for free. I try to stand on their shoulders.
occz 4y ago
UX is merely the functional side of designing things, and the best resources to help me understand that has been: - The book The Design of Everyday Things - The podcast 99% Invisible
freedomben 4y ago
The best thing I ever did was just sit and watch people use my software. You can get very deep into theory and psychology, and that stuff is fun and useful, but at the end of the day I got learned more ROI on my time from watching people use my software than anything else I did. Ideally, you're just a fly on the wall, but even if you aren't it's still a useful data source.
hoofhearted 4y ago
https://tailwindui.com/components https://tailwindui.com/components
wruza 4y ago
In case no one said it yet, take your ui and perform every sensible action path one hundred times. Most of the fancy animations, drawers, pickers and beauty-based designs get old long before you’re halfway there.
tahseen_kakar 4y ago
I think the best way to increase your user experience skills is to be comfortable using design patterns. By learning how to use them, you will be able to create a consistent experience for your users, which can make a big difference in their overall satisfaction. Another thing that helped me was studying designers who inspire me. Just looking at their work and seeing what they've done gave me ideas for new features and ways of improving my own designs. I also invested in my education by taking classes and seminars about UX design. By doing this, I learned more about industry best practices and how other people were solving problems similar to those I encountered at work. Deciding on your concentration was an important part of my education because it helped me focus on what kind of designer I wanted to become—web UI designer or UX researcher? Once I knew what type of designer I wanted to be, it helped me set goals for myself that would help me achieve my dream career goal (e.g., get hired by Google). Implementing your learning is very important as well because if you don't practice daily then nothing will change! So, after reading articles about UX design patterns and techniques on
- staticBr 4y ago
  @tahseen_kakar: Thanks for the reply! Are there any classes / seminars you can recommend?
interleave 4y ago
In the past 2 years I learned to conduct and analyse in-depth interviews in the health-care sector. My goal was 100 interviews. To get a hang of it. I finished my 300th interview recently. For me, as a software developer, there is nothing harder and more valuable than those conversations.
- yosamino 4y ago
  That sounds very interesting - do you have some tips about how you learned this skill and how to do these interviews ?
mcjiggerlog 4y ago
Honestly, like with most skills, practice. Build lots of interfaces and complex interactions and you will get better at it over time.
orthecreedence 4y ago
> What helped you increase your UX skills? Disclosure: not a professional designer/UX person but have learned a lot over the years. Honestly, building things that were terrible (not on purpose) and going back later and trying to pick apart what I did wrong. User feedback is really important here. Things like "how do I do..." or "where is the button to..." are signals that your UX needs improvement. I think it's useful to be able to look at your work with a critical eye. Of course, if you have the ability, show the things you build to a designer and ask them for honest critique. Put yourself into the shoes of a user and work backwards from there. When I first started doing UI/UX, I put myself in the shoes of a programmer and worked towards the design. This will not ever work. Come at it from the perspective of "if I were to use this app, what are the most useful features and how do I access them?" Work backwards from there and have your UI/UX inform your architecture. Not the other way around. Also, one thing that has helped me is to not get too wrapped up in design trends. It's a distraction from developing a solid foundation. You can have a great UX that people like without having to do the LATEST thing. One last thing: it can be good UX without being beautiful. To me, UX is about discovery: can people figure out how to use it without consulting the manual? If so, it's good UX. The design might be trashy and look 90s but that's less important than having something people are comfortable using.
pramodbiligiri 4y ago
It partly depends on where your skills are at, currently. "Refactoring UI" (the book and their videos) turned out to be a great resource for me when I read it. "Don't Make Me Think" as well. A couple of the recent older threads on this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29428533 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29428533 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26932020 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26932020
jasfi 4y ago
Good tools help a lot, by that I mean frameworks and libraries, e.g. for CSS.
tuyenhx 4y ago
You dont have to read a lot of books about this topic. In my exp, I tried a lot of software, then remember what make me happy when using. Apply these designs in practice. Watch other people using, and improve. Then do the loop. Then if you have time, read books later. Practice make more sense.
- wmeredith 4y ago
  > Watch other people using, and improve. This is the critical bit. Build-what-you-like only gets you so far.
zafka 4y ago
I think all developers hardware and software should read "Design for Everyday Living" <SP> https://www.amazon.com/Design-Everyday-Things-Revised-Expanded https://www.amazon.com/Design-Everyday-Things-Revised-Expand...
- feral 4y ago
  Zafka seems to be recommending "The Design of Everyday Things" here, from that link which appears mangled to me. (looks like there are many books with similar names!)
  - palmm 4y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Design_of_Everyday_Things https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Design_of_Everyday_Things The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman
dsmmcken 4y ago
Exposure. Try a lot of software, like everything you can possibly get your hands on to play with. Start with your area of interest, or focus of work, but don't limit yourself to your space. Try as many applications from as broad of fields as you can. Try to find something you like about everything you try. Try to articulate exactly what you like about it. Try to find something you hate about it. How would you improve that thing you hate? Practice thinking critically. You'll start to collect ideas and make connections of interesting interaction patterns. Maybe the way they handle a mini-map in a random GIS software you tried would be perfect for an unrelated music composing app you are trying to build. Maybe you see a great settings config in an a 3d texturing program, or a video game, but it has exactly the range of features you need.
stephencoyner 4y ago
There’s many things you can do outside of work that others have suggested. In terms of making your UX skills better, try doing some UX work and ensure you have a complete story. Share a crisp problem you’re solving that’s focused in scope. Share an audit of similar experiences that inspired you (they shouldn’t just be competitors). Share insights that you gained from that audit. Then after all of this, share your mock-ups and reinforce them with how and why you landed there. Overtime, you will start to get really good at thinking of parallel experiences that will inspire your work. As a designer, I’ve found all teams to be really receptive to this process (especially eng that can review those audited experiences and agree or disagree with your points). Edit: this should be obvious, but talk to your users as often as you can and always ask why to get to the heart of their points
will5421 4y ago
Make something, then forget about it until you need to use it. Forgetting is the important part.
donohoe 4y ago
Honestly, I'd work in customer service. I learned so so so much from interacting with real people. Waaaay-back, I got my start ay The New York Times as a customer service rep (2003?) for the website. I walked people through password resets, duplicate crossword subscriptions, cancellations, and even helping them search for articles. Lots of random interactions. It opened my eyes to the ways that UX helps and hinders people, and sends too easily them in the wrong direction. That to me was the best and biggest starting point in UX design; the first-hand perspectives of others, and empathy. The rest can follow after that.
- whitepoplar 4y ago
  Cool! I'd love to know the things you've learned after dealing with real people. Can you share some with us?
SkyLemon 4y ago
I usually recommend the following to people I work with: Practice, but also in all aspects of life, UX - User experience, is not limited to only the realm of computer interface. Learn to paper prototype, by hand, no computer, no rulers, it's not meant to look pretty, at lest not at first (graphing paper is recommended). Read Norman's design principles (https://www.educative.io/answers/what-are-normans-design-principles https://www.educative.io/answers/what-are-normans-design-pri...). Why because they are short and concise, and a good starting point, but not necessarily the be all and end all. (First learn the rules, understand the rules and why they exist, then if needed break them.) Then look at everything in to world, everything at one point had to be designed. Ask yourself what was the reason. Why did something get build they way it did. Read up on general design and look into intent of why something was/is done a certain way. Why are milk and eggs at the back of a store? Why are they together? Look at every door handle, why is it the way it is, what does it communicate? Sidewalks, roads, crossing, traffic lights, color usage, shapes, position orientation. Look at everything around you and work out why it is the way it is. Once you catch yourself doing this subconsciously, look at graphic design, ads, magazines, chose your own adventure books. (Slightly off topic but a good radio series: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/undertheinfluence https://www.cbc.ca/radio/undertheinfluence) In the end keep in mind, that a lot of design is a response to a need, Sometime bad design is needed, bad design forms a presentence, and unless you are willing to retrain every user, you likely have to follow it... think Qwerty keyboards. Good luck!
- sumtechguy 4y ago
  Also keep in mind what each step is doing. Is it clear what to do? What will happen next? Why am I filling out this form (again)? Above all use your GUI. Use it yourself. Pretend you know nothing of the space and is it clear what is going on? Grab someone and have them use it, do not walk them through it. Can they get through it without help? Are they getting stuck? One that has been bugging me for a few years now. If you have something that is required. Make sure it is marked. Make sure if they hit next you do not clear out the whole form.
sonofhans 4y ago
Ooh, I’ve been doing nothing but this for 30 years. There’s other good advice in this thread, but my main advice is to pay close attention to people. UX is just applied psychology. If you understand humans well enough then you can create good solutions for them. It’s not surprising — you won’t create a good cat toy if you don’t understand cats. 1. Keep learning how humans use software. This is rooted in our physiology, psychology, and culture. It’s remarkably sticky across different contexts, and it’s learnable. Watch people using software; get them to talk about what they’re doing. You can do this in a lightweight way with coworkers — “Will you show me how you do X?” Then pay close attention and ask questions. 2. Prioritize task context and workflow. For the most part, UI design is not nearly as important as workflow. How does a user get from where they are to a solution? Whatever solution you design must meet the user where they are, where they have the problem. So be very sensitive to user context — as you watch people use software, pay attention to where they start, and what expectations they bring with them. 3. Document and maintain concrete goals for all design work. Before you design, write down a small list of goals in the user’s own language. “User stories,” we often call these. As you work, keep going back to that list to make sure that you’re staying focused on what users really need, rather than what you think is cool. As you use new software, try to reverse engineer this list of goals — “What were the designers thinking? What did they expect me to do here?” 4. Check your ego, and learn to love being wrong. Put unfinished work in front of people. Cheerfully accept all feedback without explaining or defending. Always expect that your design solutions are not good enough, and can only be improved by testing them with real humans. You are not your user; you must position yourself to be surprised by them, and to react well to that surprise.
- btbuildem 4y ago
  Context and workflow, 1000x
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- sneusse 4y ago
  This. Well, minus point 3 or include the user feedback in your goals. Also keep in mind that most people cannot articulate what they really want but most of the time they will complain about a bad solution. Also try to mimic the other applications your clients are using regularly - even when the UX is bad. It’s easier for them to remember one broken workflow than multiple.
windows2020 4y ago
I believe most concepts, like UX, can be broken down into multiple pieces, each of which can be described on a spectrum. On the right side, we may find: * consistency * metaphorical * discoverability * ease of access * attention to detail On the left side, we'd find the opposite. Where to be on the spectrum depends on context. For example, a sales page need not be as concerned with consistency as an application. Being conscious of the existence of these concepts is key. Example: what does '...' mean in many applications? If you don't know, did you subconsciously? And don't forget, design is partially subjective, however, a decision may be objectively inconsistent, un-metaphorical, etc.
ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
I consider usability to be a critical component of "UX." I started by reading The Design of Everyday Things. It's a book that changed my life. There was just a thread, hereabouts, about the book[0]. I also took a few classes with the company that Don Norman co-owns (NNG)[1]. These are useful, but not a "philosopher's stone." They tend to push user group testing a lot, and I'm not a huge fan of UG testing. I tend to lean on the platform standards, a lot. As I develop Apple software, that's easy. Apple has a very heavy-duty tradition of UI[2]. It's not perfect, but I keep on tossing out my fancy custom UI, in favor of the built-in UI. They did a hell of a lot of work, so I don't have to. I usually regret "taking the road less traveled by."[3] I strongly suggest getting familiar with the built-in UI for whichever platform/industry you are working with. Look at ISO icons[4]. Being "unique" is not always a good thing. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32135115 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32135115 [1] https://www.nngroup.com https://www.nngroup.com [2] https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guidelines/guidelines/overview/ https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline... [3] https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany/the-road-most-traveled-by/ https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany/the-road-most-travel... [4] https://www.iso.org/obp/ui/#search https://www.iso.org/obp/ui/#search
- NKosmatos 4y ago
  Came here to recommend the NN group. Plenty of free resources, guides and studies from the “godfathers” of UI/UX design :-)
- CornCobs 4y ago
  What in your opinion doesn't work with UG testing?
  - ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
    I remember someone doing a write-up, once, that nailed it. I won't be able to come close. First, regardless of how well the group is chosen, it will never truly represent the actual user base. As long as that is kept in mind, while reviewing the results, that's great; but, in my experience, people tend to believe that the UG actually represents a valid proxy of the destination users, and aren't prepared, when the actual users get their hands on your baby, and start clicking on the wrong buttons, and not understanding something that's "perfectly obvious," etc. Next, the group knows they are testing, and will do things like report an issue, instead of working around it. That may seem to be the best thing, but the workarounds can tell you a great deal. Usually, it's discovering that the users have an entirely different mental model of the UX than you had thought. I've found that it can sometimes pay great dividends to "lean into" the "incorrect" mental model. It can make a night and day difference on how the product is received. They may also not use it in their everyday work. At the company I used to work for, the UG was done on-premises, in a special room, with one-way mirrors, and cameras, all around. Users were given specific workflows, and did not use the software the way they wanted to. We paid a lot of money for that, and it didn't tell us squat. It just gave us some "low-hanging fruit" feedback. Also, it was my experience that managers and architect-types did not want to hear information that went counter to their own context. They would write off the results of user tests that indicated that their "baby" wasn't exactly a hit. This was about personal bias and ego, but, when the person writing the checks doesn't want to hear bad news, guess what? No bad news reaches them. If the product tanks in public, it gets a lot harder to ignore the bad news. A well-done UGT can get things like this, but, in my experience, that doesn't happen. Also, UGT is usually done under a veil of NDA/secrecy. Once the product hits the streets, people start hacking it, and, in my experience, these hacks can put my original work to shame. In one product I created, I worked for months to create some truly awesome clients for my backend. These were masterful. They answered all needs. They made the product great. And no one used them. I used to receive almost constant bitching about my work. Instead, a relatively "bad" programmer created a WP plugin, that everyone wanted to use. Eventually, I threw in the towel on my client, and the new team that took over, made his plugin the reference implementation (including things like adding JSONP stuff that allowed it to be broken away from WP). I am not a fan of sloppy MVPs, but there's a lot to be said for putting working code in front of actual users, in their "native" context, and then carefully observing them, in a non-Heisenberg way. So, I guess TL;DR, is that I think controlled UGT is nice, but expensive, and of limited value. Open betas are probably better, as long as there is some way to solicit feedback on how the product is used. Dealing with negative feedback sucks, but, in my experience, that is what is required to improve the product. I've received more value in profanity-laced diatribes, than in reams of Excel spreadsheets.
jaredlt 4y ago
I loved the book Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug Sort, simple and insightful. https://sensible.com/dont-make-me-think/ https://sensible.com/dont-make-me-think/
efortis 4y ago
For business apps, make an effort to become a domain expert and user/operator on their subject and focus on making UIs easy to use, as opposed to easy learn and difficult to use. “…if we were focused on making everything easy to learn, rather than easy to use, we would all be riding tricycles. The bicycle is harder to learn to ride, but much more powerful.” - Douglas Engelbart
eternityforest 4y ago
I try to think UI-first. When I start a project it's not "How do I implement this functionality" it's "How do I make this UI". UX is a lot deeper than where the buttons go, it's about workflow, and architectural decisions can constrain UI. Using a UNIXy suite type model? You might have trouble editing an earlier decision without undoing all work after that, unless you are very careful. Some architectures might make auto discovery and drop boxes hard and users will need to type IP addresses themselves. I'm convinced a top notch UI has to be a goal from the start, or it will take twice the work. Good UX means the actual functionality is designed based on the psychology of the users, not the logic of the task. An undo button is worth more than beautiful code. 2 redundant buttons that do almost the same thing, that could just as well be done by manually entering parameters, is fine if that's what users want and it will save time and stop mistakes. You're not modeling a task, you're modeling how a user does a task. Next up, white space. It really is important. Packing 200k things on screen will annoy everyone. Modern UI design might disappoint some in terms of aesthetics, many people hate the ultraminimal look, but the layout is pretty good and paying attention to how everyone else does it makes sense. When was the last time you needed a manual or google to use an Android app? Almost never for me, because they are self documenting and things just work.
- r_hoods_ghost 4y ago
  Packing 200k things on screen will annoy everyone... except power users (not literally 200k things obviously). If you're building a specialist, usually business, application then often all the users will be power users fairly quickly, because they will spend all day every day in your application. In this case their priority will be doing things quickly and accurately, and having all the information they need available when they need it. My priority as a UX designer in this instance (or my priority as a designer herder these days) should be enabling them to do this, and not making stuff look pretty and well spaced in the first instance. This will often involve cramming lots of information and icons into a small space and minimising white space, and will sometimes involve making an application hard to use for newcomers. And that's fine! If it is a bit of software that someone is going to be using 40 hours a week for the next 10 years then the priority is the user who already knows the system, and not the user who is learning the system. Although you need to ensure that the system is actually learnable, which is largely about consistency, documentation (gasp!) and tutorials, and surfacing the most frequently performed actions. I just went through a battle with a UI designer who wanted to break up an existing interface used in a marking tool into several screens because the current UI was hugely cluttered (which it is) and intimidating (yep, looks scary) and hard to learn (actually not, onboarding of a new user takes about 30 minutes. 25 of which is them following a long to a video). The design they came up with would have looked much nicer, but would have resulted in a much poorer UX, as it would have involved the assessor switching between multiple tabs, scrolling up and down and dragging and dropping items across the screen. And doing this literally thousands of times over the course of a couple of weeks. I'd already been through a similar battle with a previous UI designer to eliminate drag and drop in the same interface a couple of years ago because I had a user develop RSI using it. In doing so I made the I terrace uglier and more cluttered but eliminated many hundreds of drag and drop actions a day for each user. Anyway, moral of the story, sometimes a good UX is only possible if you have a "bad" or at least ugly and cluttered UI. This doesn't mean that you should ignore aesthetics, or go out of your way to make things ugly, but that sometimes cluttered, information dense and unintuitive to new users is the way to go.
lifeplusplus 4y ago
My story/Ted-talk on how I a dev learned design: 1. I downloaded photoshop 2. Opened it 3. It was white page 4. I drew a red box 5. Stared at it (was it good? was it bad?) 6. Looked at other sites and tried recreating them 7. Eventually I learned how to use photoshop but I still didn't get what made things look good, I just knew X looked better than Y??? 8. I started to learn graphic design. 9. I learned lot of design principles, art functions, colors, reptition, texture, ... yet it still didn't click. 10. Gave up but got interested in digital painting timelapse videos, where authors would go over why they are doing what they are doing. 11. I had epiphany!! Everything in design should have purpose. Every thing that's visible or not should have a purpose, a feeling, a message. Everything should be intentional. Participated in lots of competitions and overtime honed visual skills. 12. Ok now I could design beautiful stuff but what to put again, I can make it pretty but what should be the content. Introducing UX research. 13. Turns out you should do some research and gather some details on what you want on the page. Who are you building for, what do they want to see or do, what do you want to show/sell/convey. Summary of few rules: - Elements of design: Line, Shape, Color, Texture, Pattern, Negative Space, Mass, Contrast, Proportion, Proximity, Spacing, Balance, Photography, Positioning, Variety/Richness, Consistency, Movement, Rhythm, Tone Of message, Theme, Typography.. you manipulate these to do rest of things. - Things together are seen as one, things same color are seen as together, and vice versa. - Contrast makes things stand out, contrast can be achieved by altering color, size, spacing, arrows. - Colors give feeling (excited, calm, stability), there are color pairs that go together well. Blue/orange, white/red... There can be pairs of 2,3,4 or 5 colors. Some colors don't go well together ie. blue/red. Cue human biology. - Fonts are either serif or non-serif. No point in memorizing all fonts, just browse good font pairs. Usually different fonts for heading and paragraph makes the contrast easy to achieve. Again different fonts for different purposes like colors: think happy birthday font vs lawyer office logo. - Best navigation patterns are which are common, not new ones. - Anything that is inconsistent should be intentional or it leads to confusion. ie. differing space between buttons, random font sizes, different shades of colors, etc. - Use inspirations liberally and then pick what you feel will work for your project, I use dribbble. - Colors next to each other look different then alone or other colors. Brain automatically fills up few things. Think about optical illusions where one side of box looks brighter or a dress looks like its different color but both are the same color, but due to their proximity to other colors make brain interpret them different. - keep in mind how colors work in nature, there is blue ambient color everywhere even in shadows, sun is at top and that affects how we see shadows and see things with shadows having depth. There is somewhat standardized method to do research, I tried documenting all artifacts that a UX designer working in corporate would produce: -Define Target Segment -User segment matrix (access, value) -Observe/Talk/Analyze Figure out how things are -Find out possible paint points -Experience Map / Journey map -Empathy map -SWOT analysis -Competitive Analysis Features -Stakeholder Mapping -Analyze and Pick Pain Point -WHAT WHO WHERE WHEN -FIVE WHYS -Crazy 8 -Affinity Diagramming -Group Critique -Scenario Mapping -Solution Generation -HMW -Storyboarding ideas picked from crazy 8 -Solo critique -Group critique -Business Model canvas -Value proposition canvas -Pick Solution -Feasibility vs Impact Chart -User Persona -Solution Creation -Use Cases / User story (as a user..) -Feature Brainstorming -Must/Could/Should/Wont have -User Journey -User Flow -Card sorting -Wireframes -Moodboards -Brief (goals, criteria, spec, etc) -MVP -A/B
kareemm 4y ago
Some light theory and heavy practice is the best way to improve. Credentials: been doing UX work for 25 years and I run https://www.TrialToPaid.com https://www.TrialToPaid.com where I'm well paid to improve UX to grow trial conversion revenue. Here are three steps you can take: 1. Read Don't Make Me Think by Steve Krug, User Interface Design for Programmers by Joel Spolsky, Refactoring UI, and (optionally) The Design of Everyday Things (this will get you paying attention to UX and UI in the real world). The core principal of good UX is Spolsky's maxim: "A user interface is well-designed when the program behaves exactly how the user thought it would." 2. After reading, go do 10 hallway usability tests on an interface you know well. 3. Then redesign the interface using the principles from #1 and run usability tests on that. Later, rinse, repeat. The main idea here is: 1. Get some decent grounding 2. Learn from where users stumble over an interface 3. Try and improve the interface 4. Get feedback on your improvements (did they help? what other problems did they cause?)
- shockleyje 4y ago
  Your site is down buddy
  - xupybd 4y ago
    Yeah it's not a great user experience currently. I think the problem is a typo. There is a website without the www that works. http://trialtopaid.com http://trialtopaid.com It's an instant redirect to another domain.
- asdjfhjlaksdhf 4y ago
  links broke
stayux 4y ago
Start with the fundamentals. I have published on my blog introduction series of articles for beginners (don't subscribe, it is not necessary). https://stayux.substack.com/s/ux-design https://stayux.substack.com/s/ux-design UX is a deep topic. But from software-developer perspective you must cover the basics (if you choose so). My book recommendation list: Laws of UX: Using Psychology to Design Better Products & Services https://www.amazon.com/Laws-UX-Psychology-Products-Services/dp/149205531X https://www.amazon.com/Laws-UX-Psychology-Products-Services/... Think First: My No-Nonsense Approach to Creating Successful Products, Memorable User Experiences + Very Happy Customers https://www.amazon.com/Think-First-No-Nonsense-Successful-Experiences-ebook/dp/B015DC4SCU https://www.amazon.com/Think-First-No-Nonsense-Successful-Ex... About Face: The Essentials of Interaction Design https://www.amazon.com/About-Face-Essentials-Interaction-Design/dp/1118766571/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2KZQQL7OYD5DF&keywords=the+essentials+of+interaction+design&qid=1658342653&sprefix=the+essentials+of+interac%2Caps%2C235&sr=8-1 https://www.amazon.com/About-Face-Essentials-Interaction-Des... I hope this helps, good luck:)
vladstudio 4y ago
Lots of great comments here. I'd like to add something unexpected: story-telling (or, creative writing). An interface is a story. Even better, an interactive story. P.S. I also found that it helps a lot if you read the copy aloud when designing it.
carapace 4y ago
Read "Humane Interface" by Jef Raskin. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Humane_Interface https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Humane_Interface https://archive.org/details/humaneinterfacen00rask https://archive.org/details/humaneinterfacen00rask
- chx 4y ago
  Came here to post this. Also, Cooper's Inmates Are Running The Asylum.
layer8 4y ago
In addition to what others have already mentioned, a lot can be learned from the old(!) Windows and OS X user interface design guidelines: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/uxguide/guidelines https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/uxguide/guide... https://apple.stackexchange.com/a/189487 https://apple.stackexchange.com/a/189487
- GuB-42 4y ago
  For me, Windows 7 is the peak in terms of UI/UX. It has been refined over many years, and it was close to perfect, so much that between later versions, nothing changed much. In Windows 7, changes were mostly cosmetic, taking advantage of modern graphics hardware and it was good. So it is certainly a good guide. Windows 8 broke everything and we still havent recovered. I blame mobile devices, as designers now try to offer a similar experience on mobile and desktop devices, which is a good thing, except it is almost impossible to do well. I don't know much about the Apple ecosystem, I am sure it is great, but did they survive the mobile apocalypse and managed not to mess things up?
  - layer8 4y ago
    > I don't know much about the Apple ecosystem, I am sure it is great, but did they survive the mobile apocalypse and managed not to mess things up? They didn’t. Flat design, invisible scrollbars, lower contrast, rounded corners, unintelligible monochrome vector icons, and other loss of affordances have found their way into macOS (and iOS of course). But at least the macOS UI does not try to be touch-compatible.
bena 4y ago
I'm not a UX developer by trade, but I've had to develop UX in my time so I've picked up some things. It's not about how fast you get to something. You talk to users and they will go on and on and on about "clicks". Anyone talking to you about the number of clicks doesn't understand UI let alone UX. Making everything "one click" away is how you get those massive button interfaces. It's just information overload and even harder to navigate than something that would take more clicks to navigate. Another way to think about this is that a book takes many "clicks" to write. And a book that was written in one "click" wouldn't be good to read. Some long books are quick to read and some short books take forever to read. Flow is way more important than number of actions. Realizing that always shooting for "easier" is a mistake. Things must flow. Except where they shouldn't. Sometimes you want to actually put in resistance. Sometimes you want to make sure that what a user does is actually what they want to do. You want them acting with purpose and intention. If something has a large effect on the system, you want people to not accidentally do that. The best way to do that is to make it slightly involved.
jrockway 4y ago
This is not great advice, but I try to make sure I only write software that I use. That way if something is painful to me, I know people that didn't write the code have no chance of being able to use it, so it has to change. Certainly, in a software engineer's career, you'll often be asked to make things that are not directly useful to you. Force yourself to use them anyway, or you miss that valuable path of getting feedback -- "do I even like it?" If you made it and you don't like it, it's probably not good. I think this, in general, does yield pretty good results. I think software engineers have much better work tools than other engineers (Emacs is a lot nicer than Solidworks), and that's because you use the tools you make to develop the tools you're making, and get a lot of experience in what it's like to be a user.
throwaway0asd 4y ago
I learned CSS working email before and after the release of IE7. IE7 had a completely different box model than IE6 and email is incredibly primitive and unforgiving. Webmail is even worse. I learned JavaScript when I was involuntarily reassigned from a design job to a developer job. I just had to figure it out. I learned to write code in an imperative functional way because I didn’t have prior bad practices and I didn’t want a bunch of vanity decoration. Lately I have been maintaining an OS GUI in the browser. It turned out to be easier and faster without a framework. Less is more when there are many moving parts and competing concerns. What helped me the most with this is good test automation against user events in the browser. I was able to write my own tool to do this and so long as the page was served from localhost I didn’t have to mess with the complexities of CDP.
swyx 4y ago
study and compile every bit of advice that people hand out and make it easy to retrieve on demand: https://github.com/sw-yx/spark-joy https://github.com/sw-yx/spark-joy
- staticBr 4y ago
  Thanks mate, that is a nice compilation in this repo!
cpursley 4y ago
I've gotten a lot of mileage out of following Victor Ponamariov: - https://user-interface.io https://user-interface.io - https://hundred.user-interface.io https://hundred.user-interface.io <- this is especially good - https://twitter.com/vponamariov https://twitter.com/vponamariov <- he often has great threads
sbmthakur 4y ago
The case-studies by Growth.Design have been pretty helpful. https://growth.design/case-studies https://growth.design/case-studies
onion2k 4y ago
What helped you increase your UX skills? I started caring about users. I decided that I genuinely want them to enjoy using what I build - not in a "hey that's cool" or "ooo that's beautiful" way, but in a "wow, doing that sucky task I have to do every day is a bit less sucky now" way. I put effort in to solving hard problems so I can make users lives a bit easier. It turns out that thinking this way also makes my job more fun.
- matwood 4y ago
  This is what I was going to say, but even simpler...give a shit how the UI/UX works and looks. That means thinking about the details and how something is really used.
hyperman1 4y ago
Give your program to a real user. Ask them to do a task. Shut up, look, and watch 'm squirm. Keep up for an hour. If you start assuming this particular user must be braindead and failed basic logic, repeat with a new real user until the lesson sinks in. Realize your crystal-clear design has in fact plenty of holes, and user will curse your name if you release now. Bang head against wall for therapeutic value (your head, not theirs). Congrats, you're now an UX expert. I did it once. Turned out my understanding of the real core problem was deeply flawed. UPDATE: Maybe interesting to give some details of this. I was developing a program everybody called the calendar. Basically there's a list of people, and they need to have a timeslot each somewhere in the next year. Customer was the people who scheduled these time slots. First version of the calendar app was ... a calendar. Columns monday tuesday wednesday ..., rows with hours and minutes. Drag a person on top of it and presto. You know the drill. Testing with users revealed something was off. No user could really tell what was wrong, it looked exactly as they had asked, but everybody agreed this was not it. Somehow, the better design dawned: Even if they called it a calender, they wanted a task list. Not the date/time aspect but the person aspect was central and required most screen estate. They needed to be able to select the right people in the right order, giving priority to some people but also being sure nobody was forgotten. Date/time selection could generally be automated or needed a simple text field so they could quickly type it in. The redesign took about a day. All the business logic and most of the UI widgets could be recycled. Just had to add a dumb list with checkboxes. Nevertheless, it looked completely different when finished, with widgets moved between pages and resized as their importance grew or shrunk. I kept a calendar widget in there out of some kind of residual guilt, but it was almost completely ignored.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- hyperman1 4y ago
  Maybe another fun example: Data entry. The state has some official paper form, people want to type it in the computer. So I created a page with fields in a reasonable order: First identification, then contact info, then the different aspects forming the purpose of the form. One day, I manage to acquire an actual form as provided by the state. It turns out to be organically grown and the resulting field order made no sense at all. The first field was a phone number, for some reason. Name and surname were actually on 2 different pages, with lots of stuff in between. No idea how it got so messed up. So I ordered the fields in my form in the same bad order as the state form. Users loved it. The could just tab-tab-tab quickly fill it in.
acarabott 4y ago
You don’t need to build a product in order to user test. You can take an existing product, watch a totally new user use it for the first time, and learn a huge amount. I suggest doing this for a type of software that you know really well, as you’ll be more surprised by your own assumptions.
spaetzleesser 4y ago
I am not a UX guy but I feel a lot of them could benefit from trying to understand their users and what the tool is actually used for. I feel a lot of them have a “I know better” attitude and don’t respect their users.
z3t4 4y ago
Getting feedback from users... And looking at statistics (what they don't tell you will show up in quantity analysis)
zichy 4y ago
Question yourself every step of the way if you are creating barriers for anyone. To get your started, I recommend this short summary about universal design, inclusive design, and accessibility: https://sayyeah.com/digital-insights/universal-design-accessibility-inclusive-design/ https://sayyeah.com/digital-insights/universal-design-access...
labratmatt 4y ago
Tell yourself and others that you're and empath and that you're human-centered. Seek out like minds and converse with them about interfaces. Do it lots - for years.
bitwize 4y ago
Trying ideas out with an expert in the field. Listening to their criticism. When they, or someone else, is confused by the operation of my work, understand that it could be a UI fail and make efforts to make clearer the communication between application and user. Above all else -- practice. Being a good UI designer is like being a good writer -- your job is to communicate all that your audience needs to know, without overwhelming, confusing, or distracting them. A balance needs to be struck. What, in any given moment, does the user need to know? How do you arrange that information so that it's clear? How do you present the different choices to proceed to the user? It really boils down to, if the user knows at a glance what the situation is and what they can do next, you'll be fine.
PointyFluff 4y ago
Firstly, by not calling it "UX".
- staticBr 4y ago
  Okay, enlighten me. What would be correct and why?
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
sbf501 4y ago
UX is very much rooted in both industrial design and psychology. I would highly recommend taking design courses in college, it will help hone your eye for how to perceive a task through a given experience. Contrary to popular belief, UX has nothing to do with software: UX is just the sexy new term. It all stems from design, and was studied heavily in the early 20th century onwards. Look at a can-opener, for example, or the classic Jerry-can from WW2. It is about how humans interact with the world through design.
spurgu 4y ago
Simply getting annoyed by websites I've browsed over the years.
frozenlettuce 4y ago
I think that using systems with bad UX teaches you a lot on what not to do. I was unlucky/lucky to use Lotus Notes for about 4 years, and that changed my perception on how much suffering software can inflict on its users. If you have a friend/relative that happens to work with it, try interviewing them.
- bmitc 4y ago
  Lol. Good ol' Lotus Notes. I think it's safe to say that Lotus Notes has no UX other than the UX that emerges from its ad hoc nature as a piece of software. I wish I had kept my list of Lotus Notes shenanigans from the time when I worked at a company that used it. I don't think I have ever used a worse piece of software.
devteambravo 4y ago
Read a lot of sketches from this brilliant woman: https://uxknowledgebase.com/ https://uxknowledgebase.com/
mikewarot 4y ago
It was the days of MS-DOS. I had written a program to manage the inspection of Fire Extinguishers in Fossil Fuel generating stations. The Operations manager pulled a random person in, explained to them that he understood they weren't trained for this, and anything that was wrong was MY fault, not theirs. He gave them a list of things to do, and told me to watch and not say anything. The user got stumped at 1 second into the task... and I blurted out "just press F1 for help"... to which the reply was "How is he supposed to know that?"... and thus began my education of building appropriate user interfaces. F1 was ALWAYS on the screen after that, and I learned lots of things about the differences between someone just trying to get a job done, and my view of computers.
mrcartmeneses 4y ago
I took a course tonight by Bruce “Tog” Tognazzini from Nielsen Norman group. He’s fantastic. The course was great. I came away with a lot of useful tools and a change in my mindset
Kalanos 4y ago
play lots of video games
indymike 4y ago
This: Work, like, love. Build something that works. Then make it likable. After that, go for lovable.
balls187 4y ago
Been taking UX Academy Foundations course from Design Lab. It's already been well worth the cost and effort. https://designlab.com/ https://designlab.com/
6510 4y ago
You look at it again, you again scream inside your head: So, what is the user actually trying to do? Then you hate on your previous solution until you are convinced it is terrible. The only thing it has going for it self is that people are now used to your terrible thing. If you are going to change it it better be dramatically better. You have 100 ideas that should all be considered bad. You prototype a few of them and try to convince yourself you've made it worse. If this fails you try to convince yourself the improvement is not big enough. If this fails you make more prototypes. If you are going to screw with peoples muscle memory you want larger gains out of the mistake. Then you put it live, if enough people hate it you revert it back to the original version. If more people complaint how the new version was actually better you go back to the drawing board. If no one cares however, then you've done a good job. Listen to feedback but don't involve the users outside live testing, they don't have the hate one can project on ones own work. If they could give useful feedback it is something obvious that you convince yourself you should have seen. edit: Dogfooding is good but mind the learning curve. Dogfooding might actually be required to approach perfection.
inshadows 4y ago
Just make fonts gray, put as little content on as much screen area as possible, and include some Corporate Memphis around.
Golf101 4y ago
I am sponsored by my company to complete a UX certificate for my continued learning goal. The beautiful thing about it is since my company is aware of my learning, not only that they support me financially but also positively look for opportunities that I can apply what I learn to real-life projects. That helps me learn and improve my UX mindset significantly over the time. So I would say taking UX courses, reading related articles, books, resources are important but the key tip is searching for projects (personal or professional) to apply what you learn as soon as possible. It should never be too soon or “I don’t think I am ready yet”. You got it.
viggity 4y ago
The Science of Great UI is an amazeballs course. Like knock you on your ass amazing. I could not recommend it enough. Mark Miller is a genius. http://www.sgui.com/ http://www.sgui.com/
lproven 4y ago
Mu number 1 tip from some 20 years of watching UI design evolve: Design that is more accessible for users with disabilities is more accessible for everyone. The first level of this is easy, but few do it. Step 1: use a desktop PC. Windows or Linux as you prefer, but not a Mac, and not a laptop. Step 2: unplug the mouse. Learn to do everything with the keyboard. The WWW is a pain but most other things are easy, but you'll need to learn the keystrokes. Few know them these days. Windows is good at this, and you'll quickly discover that most Linux desktops are poor. (For me, Xfce is about the best.) Spend a week working like this. You will discover a tonne of stuff about UI design you never noticed before. Step 3: for the most advanced users only. Now you are used to working without a pointing device, install a screenreader -- NVDA for Windows is good and free. Now, unplug your screen. Learn to work with keyboard and sound only. I am part way through learning this and it's savage, but it's like learning to play chess blindfold. Once you have the patterns in your head, you discover that you don't need to see them and you can still be fast and efficient. But steps 1 & 2 will put you in the 1% of best UI designers there are in the world today.
zepolen 4y ago
Everyone will tell you to read a bunch of books or look at how others use your product. There is a simple secret to a great UX. USE YOUR OWN PRODUCT. Ignore designers, they have no idea what a UX is about. Pretty != Workflow. Workflow is king. Find something you do all the time that takes 5 steps. Make it 1. Find something that annoys you? Fix it. Find something that's slow? Make it fast. Find something that confuses you? Make it clearer. That's all you need for a good UX.
- balls187 4y ago
  That’s funny. The first message I got from my mentor was “Good design is more than making something look pretty.”
maydemir 4y ago
Some people recommend taking a course or reading books on UX design, but I believe the best way to improve your skills is to get out there and practice. Try designing simple apps or websites, and get feedback from friends or family. Use online resources to learn more about specific UX concepts, and then apply what you've learned to your own designs. With enough practice, you'll start to develop a good sense of what makes a good user experience.
taf2 4y ago
Try explaining how to use your UI to someone over the phone without sharing screens.
lienhoangduy 4y ago
There are many ways to improve your UX skills. I've gotten to know UX here for 6 years. I'd start to research all the things about UX, try to learn from the foundation to advance knowledge, I found all the things related to UX on the internet, join the designer community (Facebook, Reddit...) to learn from each other and senior guys. Besides that, UI UX design tool can be very helpful to practice your skills, such as Figma (for pro player), Balsamiq, Miro, Visily (for newbie).

254 points by staticBr 4y ago

Hi HN, as a Software-Developer, I'm looking for resources that could help to raise my understanding of UX design. So a simple question: What helped you increase your UX skills?

qualudeheart 4y ago

Coursera has some good courses.

rad_gruchalski 4y ago

When I worked for a company selling aircraft spares, I was talking to my users every day. Everyone: from MD, though the call center, all the way to the warehouse. Seeing how they want to work and listening to what issues they had helped me "get into their shoes", thus make the software work the way they wanted it to work.

1autodev 4y ago

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blackRust 4y ago

Personally, I found this book very useful and straightforward. It is written by the creators of Tailwind CSS. https://www.refactoringui.com https://www.refactoringui.com

Anaminus 4y ago
This one amuses me. You skip the long-windedness of the front page to look at the pictures. Your eyes are caught by two example user interfaces: contact forms. The one on the left looks great. The one on the right looks awful. Yet it's the one on the left that has the big red X next to it. So you backtrack to read why they're wrong. The reason is because borders "feel" busy and cluttered. Nothing empirical. No data to back it up. Just "feelings". This led me to believe the whole website/book is going to be like this, so I haven't read any further. I'm sure it's great.
- boloust 4y ago
  > The one on the left looks great. The one on the right looks awful. This is also just a mere assertion of "feelings", with nothing empirical and no data to back it up. As long as those are the rules we're playing by, I'll say that to me, the design on the left screams "designed by a dev", in the pejorative sense, while the one on the right looks like it had a designer involved. Whether there are actual usability improvements is an orthogonal issue, but I don't feel there's a huge gap between the two. I feel a lot of this comes down to trends, rather than actual usability. Keeping up with the latest trends in UI design is a signal that you care enough about design and UX to employ and empower a designer/ design team. Paradoxically, sometimes signalling you care about design might involve making the UX worse (relative to what the user base is trained on), if that's what the trends dictate. For example, the sudden overcompensated reaction against skeumorphism that was "flat design". Just some of my feelings.

game_the0ry 4y ago

Call me stupid, but I just pick a really good css framework and either try to copy and / or learn from it. Tech companies with great engineers and designers have given away these for free. I try to stand on their shoulders.

occz 4y ago

UX is merely the functional side of designing things, and the best resources to help me understand that has been: - The book The Design of Everyday Things - The podcast 99% Invisible

freedomben 4y ago

The best thing I ever did was just sit and watch people use my software. You can get very deep into theory and psychology, and that stuff is fun and useful, but at the end of the day I got learned more ROI on my time from watching people use my software than anything else I did. Ideally, you're just a fly on the wall, but even if you aren't it's still a useful data source.

hoofhearted 4y ago

https://tailwindui.com/components https://tailwindui.com/components

wruza 4y ago

In case no one said it yet, take your ui and perform every sensible action path one hundred times. Most of the fancy animations, drawers, pickers and beauty-based designs get old long before you’re halfway there.

tahseen_kakar 4y ago

I think the best way to increase your user experience skills is to be comfortable using design patterns. By learning how to use them, you will be able to create a consistent experience for your users, which can make a big difference in their overall satisfaction. Another thing that helped me was studying designers who inspire me. Just looking at their work and seeing what they've done gave me ideas for new features and ways of improving my own designs. I also invested in my education by taking classes and seminars about UX design. By doing this, I learned more about industry best practices and how other people were solving problems similar to those I encountered at work. Deciding on your concentration was an important part of my education because it helped me focus on what kind of designer I wanted to become—web UI designer or UX researcher? Once I knew what type of designer I wanted to be, it helped me set goals for myself that would help me achieve my dream career goal (e.g., get hired by Google). Implementing your learning is very important as well because if you don't practice daily then nothing will change! So, after reading articles about UX design patterns and techniques on

staticBr 4y ago
@tahseen_kakar: Thanks for the reply! Are there any classes / seminars you can recommend?

interleave 4y ago

In the past 2 years I learned to conduct and analyse in-depth interviews in the health-care sector. My goal was 100 interviews. To get a hang of it. I finished my 300th interview recently. For me, as a software developer, there is nothing harder and more valuable than those conversations.

yosamino 4y ago
That sounds very interesting - do you have some tips about how you learned this skill and how to do these interviews ?

mcjiggerlog 4y ago

Honestly, like with most skills, practice. Build lots of interfaces and complex interactions and you will get better at it over time.

orthecreedence 4y ago

> What helped you increase your UX skills? Disclosure: not a professional designer/UX person but have learned a lot over the years. Honestly, building things that were terrible (not on purpose) and going back later and trying to pick apart what I did wrong. User feedback is really important here. Things like "how do I do..." or "where is the button to..." are signals that your UX needs improvement. I think it's useful to be able to look at your work with a critical eye. Of course, if you have the ability, show the things you build to a designer and ask them for honest critique. Put yourself into the shoes of a user and work backwards from there. When I first started doing UI/UX, I put myself in the shoes of a programmer and worked towards the design. This will not ever work. Come at it from the perspective of "if I were to use this app, what are the most useful features and how do I access them?" Work backwards from there and have your UI/UX inform your architecture. Not the other way around. Also, one thing that has helped me is to not get too wrapped up in design trends. It's a distraction from developing a solid foundation. You can have a great UX that people like without having to do the LATEST thing. One last thing: it can be good UX without being beautiful. To me, UX is about discovery: can people figure out how to use it without consulting the manual? If so, it's good UX. The design might be trashy and look 90s but that's less important than having something people are comfortable using.

pramodbiligiri 4y ago

It partly depends on where your skills are at, currently. "Refactoring UI" (the book and their videos) turned out to be a great resource for me when I read it. "Don't Make Me Think" as well. A couple of the recent older threads on this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29428533 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29428533 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26932020 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26932020

jasfi 4y ago

Good tools help a lot, by that I mean frameworks and libraries, e.g. for CSS.

tuyenhx 4y ago

You dont have to read a lot of books about this topic. In my exp, I tried a lot of software, then remember what make me happy when using. Apply these designs in practice. Watch other people using, and improve. Then do the loop. Then if you have time, read books later. Practice make more sense.

wmeredith 4y ago
> Watch other people using, and improve. This is the critical bit. Build-what-you-like only gets you so far.

zafka 4y ago

I think all developers hardware and software should read "Design for Everyday Living" <SP> https://www.amazon.com/Design-Everyday-Things-Revised-Expanded https://www.amazon.com/Design-Everyday-Things-Revised-Expand...

feral 4y ago
Zafka seems to be recommending "The Design of Everyday Things" here, from that link which appears mangled to me. (looks like there are many books with similar names!)
- palmm 4y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Design_of_Everyday_Things https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Design_of_Everyday_Things The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman

dsmmcken 4y ago

Exposure. Try a lot of software, like everything you can possibly get your hands on to play with. Start with your area of interest, or focus of work, but don't limit yourself to your space. Try as many applications from as broad of fields as you can. Try to find something you like about everything you try. Try to articulate exactly what you like about it. Try to find something you hate about it. How would you improve that thing you hate? Practice thinking critically. You'll start to collect ideas and make connections of interesting interaction patterns. Maybe the way they handle a mini-map in a random GIS software you tried would be perfect for an unrelated music composing app you are trying to build. Maybe you see a great settings config in an a 3d texturing program, or a video game, but it has exactly the range of features you need.

stephencoyner 4y ago

There’s many things you can do outside of work that others have suggested. In terms of making your UX skills better, try doing some UX work and ensure you have a complete story. Share a crisp problem you’re solving that’s focused in scope. Share an audit of similar experiences that inspired you (they shouldn’t just be competitors). Share insights that you gained from that audit. Then after all of this, share your mock-ups and reinforce them with how and why you landed there. Overtime, you will start to get really good at thinking of parallel experiences that will inspire your work. As a designer, I’ve found all teams to be really receptive to this process (especially eng that can review those audited experiences and agree or disagree with your points). Edit: this should be obvious, but talk to your users as often as you can and always ask why to get to the heart of their points

will5421 4y ago

Make something, then forget about it until you need to use it. Forgetting is the important part.

donohoe 4y ago

Honestly, I'd work in customer service. I learned so so so much from interacting with real people. Waaaay-back, I got my start ay The New York Times as a customer service rep (2003?) for the website. I walked people through password resets, duplicate crossword subscriptions, cancellations, and even helping them search for articles. Lots of random interactions. It opened my eyes to the ways that UX helps and hinders people, and sends too easily them in the wrong direction. That to me was the best and biggest starting point in UX design; the first-hand perspectives of others, and empathy. The rest can follow after that.

whitepoplar 4y ago
Cool! I'd love to know the things you've learned after dealing with real people. Can you share some with us?

SkyLemon 4y ago

I usually recommend the following to people I work with: Practice, but also in all aspects of life, UX - User experience, is not limited to only the realm of computer interface. Learn to paper prototype, by hand, no computer, no rulers, it's not meant to look pretty, at lest not at first (graphing paper is recommended). Read Norman's design principles (https://www.educative.io/answers/what-are-normans-design-principles https://www.educative.io/answers/what-are-normans-design-pri...). Why because they are short and concise, and a good starting point, but not necessarily the be all and end all. (First learn the rules, understand the rules and why they exist, then if needed break them.) Then look at everything in to world, everything at one point had to be designed. Ask yourself what was the reason. Why did something get build they way it did. Read up on general design and look into intent of why something was/is done a certain way. Why are milk and eggs at the back of a store? Why are they together? Look at every door handle, why is it the way it is, what does it communicate? Sidewalks, roads, crossing, traffic lights, color usage, shapes, position orientation. Look at everything around you and work out why it is the way it is. Once you catch yourself doing this subconsciously, look at graphic design, ads, magazines, chose your own adventure books. (Slightly off topic but a good radio series: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/undertheinfluence https://www.cbc.ca/radio/undertheinfluence) In the end keep in mind, that a lot of design is a response to a need, Sometime bad design is needed, bad design forms a presentence, and unless you are willing to retrain every user, you likely have to follow it... think Qwerty keyboards. Good luck!

sumtechguy 4y ago
Also keep in mind what each step is doing. Is it clear what to do? What will happen next? Why am I filling out this form (again)? Above all use your GUI. Use it yourself. Pretend you know nothing of the space and is it clear what is going on? Grab someone and have them use it, do not walk them through it. Can they get through it without help? Are they getting stuck? One that has been bugging me for a few years now. If you have something that is required. Make sure it is marked. Make sure if they hit next you do not clear out the whole form.

sonofhans 4y ago

Ooh, I’ve been doing nothing but this for 30 years. There’s other good advice in this thread, but my main advice is to pay close attention to people. UX is just applied psychology. If you understand humans well enough then you can create good solutions for them. It’s not surprising — you won’t create a good cat toy if you don’t understand cats. 1. Keep learning how humans use software. This is rooted in our physiology, psychology, and culture. It’s remarkably sticky across different contexts, and it’s learnable. Watch people using software; get them to talk about what they’re doing. You can do this in a lightweight way with coworkers — “Will you show me how you do X?” Then pay close attention and ask questions. 2. Prioritize task context and workflow. For the most part, UI design is not nearly as important as workflow. How does a user get from where they are to a solution? Whatever solution you design must meet the user where they are, where they have the problem. So be very sensitive to user context — as you watch people use software, pay attention to where they start, and what expectations they bring with them. 3. Document and maintain concrete goals for all design work. Before you design, write down a small list of goals in the user’s own language. “User stories,” we often call these. As you work, keep going back to that list to make sure that you’re staying focused on what users really need, rather than what you think is cool. As you use new software, try to reverse engineer this list of goals — “What were the designers thinking? What did they expect me to do here?” 4. Check your ego, and learn to love being wrong. Put unfinished work in front of people. Cheerfully accept all feedback without explaining or defending. Always expect that your design solutions are not good enough, and can only be improved by testing them with real humans. You are not your user; you must position yourself to be surprised by them, and to react well to that surprise.

btbuildem 4y ago
Context and workflow, 1000x
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
sneusse 4y ago
This. Well, minus point 3 or include the user feedback in your goals. Also keep in mind that most people cannot articulate what they really want but most of the time they will complain about a bad solution. Also try to mimic the other applications your clients are using regularly - even when the UX is bad. It’s easier for them to remember one broken workflow than multiple.

windows2020 4y ago

I believe most concepts, like UX, can be broken down into multiple pieces, each of which can be described on a spectrum. On the right side, we may find: * consistency * metaphorical * discoverability * ease of access * attention to detail On the left side, we'd find the opposite. Where to be on the spectrum depends on context. For example, a sales page need not be as concerned with consistency as an application. Being conscious of the existence of these concepts is key. Example: what does '...' mean in many applications? If you don't know, did you subconsciously? And don't forget, design is partially subjective, however, a decision may be objectively inconsistent, un-metaphorical, etc.

ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago

I consider usability to be a critical component of "UX." I started by reading The Design of Everyday Things. It's a book that changed my life. There was just a thread, hereabouts, about the book[0]. I also took a few classes with the company that Don Norman co-owns (NNG)[1]. These are useful, but not a "philosopher's stone." They tend to push user group testing a lot, and I'm not a huge fan of UG testing. I tend to lean on the platform standards, a lot. As I develop Apple software, that's easy. Apple has a very heavy-duty tradition of UI[2]. It's not perfect, but I keep on tossing out my fancy custom UI, in favor of the built-in UI. They did a hell of a lot of work, so I don't have to. I usually regret "taking the road less traveled by."[3] I strongly suggest getting familiar with the built-in UI for whichever platform/industry you are working with. Look at ISO icons[4]. Being "unique" is not always a good thing. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32135115 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32135115 [1] https://www.nngroup.com https://www.nngroup.com [2] https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guidelines/guidelines/overview/ https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline... [3] https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany/the-road-most-traveled-by/ https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany/the-road-most-travel... [4] https://www.iso.org/obp/ui/#search https://www.iso.org/obp/ui/#search

NKosmatos 4y ago
Came here to recommend the NN group. Plenty of free resources, guides and studies from the “godfathers” of UI/UX design :-)
CornCobs 4y ago
What in your opinion doesn't work with UG testing?
- ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
  I remember someone doing a write-up, once, that nailed it. I won't be able to come close. First, regardless of how well the group is chosen, it will never truly represent the actual user base. As long as that is kept in mind, while reviewing the results, that's great; but, in my experience, people tend to believe that the UG actually represents a valid proxy of the destination users, and aren't prepared, when the actual users get their hands on your baby, and start clicking on the wrong buttons, and not understanding something that's "perfectly obvious," etc. Next, the group knows they are testing, and will do things like report an issue, instead of working around it. That may seem to be the best thing, but the workarounds can tell you a great deal. Usually, it's discovering that the users have an entirely different mental model of the UX than you had thought. I've found that it can sometimes pay great dividends to "lean into" the "incorrect" mental model. It can make a night and day difference on how the product is received. They may also not use it in their everyday work. At the company I used to work for, the UG was done on-premises, in a special room, with one-way mirrors, and cameras, all around. Users were given specific workflows, and did not use the software the way they wanted to. We paid a lot of money for that, and it didn't tell us squat. It just gave us some "low-hanging fruit" feedback. Also, it was my experience that managers and architect-types did not want to hear information that went counter to their own context. They would write off the results of user tests that indicated that their "baby" wasn't exactly a hit. This was about personal bias and ego, but, when the person writing the checks doesn't want to hear bad news, guess what? No bad news reaches them. If the product tanks in public, it gets a lot harder to ignore the bad news. A well-done UGT can get things like this, but, in my experience, that doesn't happen. Also, UGT is usually done under a veil of NDA/secrecy. Once the product hits the streets, people start hacking it, and, in my experience, these hacks can put my original work to shame. In one product I created, I worked for months to create some truly awesome clients for my backend. These were masterful. They answered all needs. They made the product great. And no one used them. I used to receive almost constant bitching about my work. Instead, a relatively "bad" programmer created a WP plugin, that everyone wanted to use. Eventually, I threw in the towel on my client, and the new team that took over, made his plugin the reference implementation (including things like adding JSONP stuff that allowed it to be broken away from WP). I am not a fan of sloppy MVPs, but there's a lot to be said for putting working code in front of actual users, in their "native" context, and then carefully observing them, in a non-Heisenberg way. So, I guess TL;DR, is that I think controlled UGT is nice, but expensive, and of limited value. Open betas are probably better, as long as there is some way to solicit feedback on how the product is used. Dealing with negative feedback sucks, but, in my experience, that is what is required to improve the product. I've received more value in profanity-laced diatribes, than in reams of Excel spreadsheets.

jaredlt 4y ago

I loved the book Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug Sort, simple and insightful. https://sensible.com/dont-make-me-think/ https://sensible.com/dont-make-me-think/

efortis 4y ago

For business apps, make an effort to become a domain expert and user/operator on their subject and focus on making UIs easy to use, as opposed to easy learn and difficult to use. “…if we were focused on making everything easy to learn, rather than easy to use, we would all be riding tricycles. The bicycle is harder to learn to ride, but much more powerful.” - Douglas Engelbart

eternityforest 4y ago

I try to think UI-first. When I start a project it's not "How do I implement this functionality" it's "How do I make this UI". UX is a lot deeper than where the buttons go, it's about workflow, and architectural decisions can constrain UI. Using a UNIXy suite type model? You might have trouble editing an earlier decision without undoing all work after that, unless you are very careful. Some architectures might make auto discovery and drop boxes hard and users will need to type IP addresses themselves. I'm convinced a top notch UI has to be a goal from the start, or it will take twice the work. Good UX means the actual functionality is designed based on the psychology of the users, not the logic of the task. An undo button is worth more than beautiful code. 2 redundant buttons that do almost the same thing, that could just as well be done by manually entering parameters, is fine if that's what users want and it will save time and stop mistakes. You're not modeling a task, you're modeling how a user does a task. Next up, white space. It really is important. Packing 200k things on screen will annoy everyone. Modern UI design might disappoint some in terms of aesthetics, many people hate the ultraminimal look, but the layout is pretty good and paying attention to how everyone else does it makes sense. When was the last time you needed a manual or google to use an Android app? Almost never for me, because they are self documenting and things just work.

r_hoods_ghost 4y ago
Packing 200k things on screen will annoy everyone... except power users (not literally 200k things obviously). If you're building a specialist, usually business, application then often all the users will be power users fairly quickly, because they will spend all day every day in your application. In this case their priority will be doing things quickly and accurately, and having all the information they need available when they need it. My priority as a UX designer in this instance (or my priority as a designer herder these days) should be enabling them to do this, and not making stuff look pretty and well spaced in the first instance. This will often involve cramming lots of information and icons into a small space and minimising white space, and will sometimes involve making an application hard to use for newcomers. And that's fine! If it is a bit of software that someone is going to be using 40 hours a week for the next 10 years then the priority is the user who already knows the system, and not the user who is learning the system. Although you need to ensure that the system is actually learnable, which is largely about consistency, documentation (gasp!) and tutorials, and surfacing the most frequently performed actions. I just went through a battle with a UI designer who wanted to break up an existing interface used in a marking tool into several screens because the current UI was hugely cluttered (which it is) and intimidating (yep, looks scary) and hard to learn (actually not, onboarding of a new user takes about 30 minutes. 25 of which is them following a long to a video). The design they came up with would have looked much nicer, but would have resulted in a much poorer UX, as it would have involved the assessor switching between multiple tabs, scrolling up and down and dragging and dropping items across the screen. And doing this literally thousands of times over the course of a couple of weeks. I'd already been through a similar battle with a previous UI designer to eliminate drag and drop in the same interface a couple of years ago because I had a user develop RSI using it. In doing so I made the I terrace uglier and more cluttered but eliminated many hundreds of drag and drop actions a day for each user. Anyway, moral of the story, sometimes a good UX is only possible if you have a "bad" or at least ugly and cluttered UI. This doesn't mean that you should ignore aesthetics, or go out of your way to make things ugly, but that sometimes cluttered, information dense and unintuitive to new users is the way to go.

lifeplusplus 4y ago

My story/Ted-talk on how I a dev learned design: 1. I downloaded photoshop 2. Opened it 3. It was white page 4. I drew a red box 5. Stared at it (was it good? was it bad?) 6. Looked at other sites and tried recreating them 7. Eventually I learned how to use photoshop but I still didn't get what made things look good, I just knew X looked better than Y??? 8. I started to learn graphic design. 9. I learned lot of design principles, art functions, colors, reptition, texture, ... yet it still didn't click. 10. Gave up but got interested in digital painting timelapse videos, where authors would go over why they are doing what they are doing. 11. I had epiphany!! Everything in design should have purpose. Every thing that's visible or not should have a purpose, a feeling, a message. Everything should be intentional. Participated in lots of competitions and overtime honed visual skills. 12. Ok now I could design beautiful stuff but what to put again, I can make it pretty but what should be the content. Introducing UX research. 13. Turns out you should do some research and gather some details on what you want on the page. Who are you building for, what do they want to see or do, what do you want to show/sell/convey. Summary of few rules: - Elements of design: Line, Shape, Color, Texture, Pattern, Negative Space, Mass, Contrast, Proportion, Proximity, Spacing, Balance, Photography, Positioning, Variety/Richness, Consistency, Movement, Rhythm, Tone Of message, Theme, Typography.. you manipulate these to do rest of things. - Things together are seen as one, things same color are seen as together, and vice versa. - Contrast makes things stand out, contrast can be achieved by altering color, size, spacing, arrows. - Colors give feeling (excited, calm, stability), there are color pairs that go together well. Blue/orange, white/red... There can be pairs of 2,3,4 or 5 colors. Some colors don't go well together ie. blue/red. Cue human biology. - Fonts are either serif or non-serif. No point in memorizing all fonts, just browse good font pairs. Usually different fonts for heading and paragraph makes the contrast easy to achieve. Again different fonts for different purposes like colors: think happy birthday font vs lawyer office logo. - Best navigation patterns are which are common, not new ones. - Anything that is inconsistent should be intentional or it leads to confusion. ie. differing space between buttons, random font sizes, different shades of colors, etc. - Use inspirations liberally and then pick what you feel will work for your project, I use dribbble. - Colors next to each other look different then alone or other colors. Brain automatically fills up few things. Think about optical illusions where one side of box looks brighter or a dress looks like its different color but both are the same color, but due to their proximity to other colors make brain interpret them different. - keep in mind how colors work in nature, there is blue ambient color everywhere even in shadows, sun is at top and that affects how we see shadows and see things with shadows having depth. There is somewhat standardized method to do research, I tried documenting all artifacts that a UX designer working in corporate would produce: -Define Target Segment -User segment matrix (access, value) -Observe/Talk/Analyze Figure out how things are -Find out possible paint points -Experience Map / Journey map -Empathy map -SWOT analysis -Competitive Analysis Features -Stakeholder Mapping -Analyze and Pick Pain Point -WHAT WHO WHERE WHEN -FIVE WHYS -Crazy 8 -Affinity Diagramming -Group Critique -Scenario Mapping -Solution Generation -HMW -Storyboarding ideas picked from crazy 8 -Solo critique -Group critique -Business Model canvas -Value proposition canvas -Pick Solution -Feasibility vs Impact Chart -User Persona -Solution Creation -Use Cases / User story (as a user..) -Feature Brainstorming -Must/Could/Should/Wont have -User Journey -User Flow -Card sorting -Wireframes -Moodboards -Brief (goals, criteria, spec, etc) -MVP -A/B

kareemm 4y ago

Some light theory and heavy practice is the best way to improve. Credentials: been doing UX work for 25 years and I run https://www.TrialToPaid.com https://www.TrialToPaid.com where I'm well paid to improve UX to grow trial conversion revenue. Here are three steps you can take: 1. Read Don't Make Me Think by Steve Krug, User Interface Design for Programmers by Joel Spolsky, Refactoring UI, and (optionally) The Design of Everyday Things (this will get you paying attention to UX and UI in the real world). The core principal of good UX is Spolsky's maxim: "A user interface is well-designed when the program behaves exactly how the user thought it would." 2. After reading, go do 10 hallway usability tests on an interface you know well. 3. Then redesign the interface using the principles from #1 and run usability tests on that. Later, rinse, repeat. The main idea here is: 1. Get some decent grounding 2. Learn from where users stumble over an interface 3. Try and improve the interface 4. Get feedback on your improvements (did they help? what other problems did they cause?)

shockleyje 4y ago
Your site is down buddy
- xupybd 4y ago
  Yeah it's not a great user experience currently. I think the problem is a typo. There is a website without the www that works. http://trialtopaid.com http://trialtopaid.com It's an instant redirect to another domain.
asdjfhjlaksdhf 4y ago
links broke

stayux 4y ago

Start with the fundamentals. I have published on my blog introduction series of articles for beginners (don't subscribe, it is not necessary). https://stayux.substack.com/s/ux-design https://stayux.substack.com/s/ux-design UX is a deep topic. But from software-developer perspective you must cover the basics (if you choose so). My book recommendation list: Laws of UX: Using Psychology to Design Better Products & Services https://www.amazon.com/Laws-UX-Psychology-Products-Services/dp/149205531X https://www.amazon.com/Laws-UX-Psychology-Products-Services/... Think First: My No-Nonsense Approach to Creating Successful Products, Memorable User Experiences + Very Happy Customers https://www.amazon.com/Think-First-No-Nonsense-Successful-Experiences-ebook/dp/B015DC4SCU https://www.amazon.com/Think-First-No-Nonsense-Successful-Ex... About Face: The Essentials of Interaction Design https://www.amazon.com/About-Face-Essentials-Interaction-Design/dp/1118766571/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2KZQQL7OYD5DF&keywords=the+essentials+of+interaction+design&qid=1658342653&sprefix=the+essentials+of+interac%2Caps%2C235&sr=8-1 https://www.amazon.com/About-Face-Essentials-Interaction-Des... I hope this helps, good luck:)

vladstudio 4y ago

Lots of great comments here. I'd like to add something unexpected: story-telling (or, creative writing). An interface is a story. Even better, an interactive story. P.S. I also found that it helps a lot if you read the copy aloud when designing it.

carapace 4y ago

Read "Humane Interface" by Jef Raskin. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Humane_Interface https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Humane_Interface https://archive.org/details/humaneinterfacen00rask https://archive.org/details/humaneinterfacen00rask

chx 4y ago
Came here to post this. Also, Cooper's Inmates Are Running The Asylum.

layer8 4y ago

In addition to what others have already mentioned, a lot can be learned from the old(!) Windows and OS X user interface design guidelines: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/uxguide/guidelines https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/uxguide/guide... https://apple.stackexchange.com/a/189487 https://apple.stackexchange.com/a/189487

GuB-42 4y ago
For me, Windows 7 is the peak in terms of UI/UX. It has been refined over many years, and it was close to perfect, so much that between later versions, nothing changed much. In Windows 7, changes were mostly cosmetic, taking advantage of modern graphics hardware and it was good. So it is certainly a good guide. Windows 8 broke everything and we still havent recovered. I blame mobile devices, as designers now try to offer a similar experience on mobile and desktop devices, which is a good thing, except it is almost impossible to do well. I don't know much about the Apple ecosystem, I am sure it is great, but did they survive the mobile apocalypse and managed not to mess things up?
- layer8 4y ago
  > I don't know much about the Apple ecosystem, I am sure it is great, but did they survive the mobile apocalypse and managed not to mess things up? They didn’t. Flat design, invisible scrollbars, lower contrast, rounded corners, unintelligible monochrome vector icons, and other loss of affordances have found their way into macOS (and iOS of course). But at least the macOS UI does not try to be touch-compatible.

bena 4y ago

I'm not a UX developer by trade, but I've had to develop UX in my time so I've picked up some things. It's not about how fast you get to something. You talk to users and they will go on and on and on about "clicks". Anyone talking to you about the number of clicks doesn't understand UI let alone UX. Making everything "one click" away is how you get those massive button interfaces. It's just information overload and even harder to navigate than something that would take more clicks to navigate. Another way to think about this is that a book takes many "clicks" to write. And a book that was written in one "click" wouldn't be good to read. Some long books are quick to read and some short books take forever to read. Flow is way more important than number of actions. Realizing that always shooting for "easier" is a mistake. Things must flow. Except where they shouldn't. Sometimes you want to actually put in resistance. Sometimes you want to make sure that what a user does is actually what they want to do. You want them acting with purpose and intention. If something has a large effect on the system, you want people to not accidentally do that. The best way to do that is to make it slightly involved.

jrockway 4y ago

This is not great advice, but I try to make sure I only write software that I use. That way if something is painful to me, I know people that didn't write the code have no chance of being able to use it, so it has to change. Certainly, in a software engineer's career, you'll often be asked to make things that are not directly useful to you. Force yourself to use them anyway, or you miss that valuable path of getting feedback -- "do I even like it?" If you made it and you don't like it, it's probably not good. I think this, in general, does yield pretty good results. I think software engineers have much better work tools than other engineers (Emacs is a lot nicer than Solidworks), and that's because you use the tools you make to develop the tools you're making, and get a lot of experience in what it's like to be a user.

throwaway0asd 4y ago

I learned CSS working email before and after the release of IE7. IE7 had a completely different box model than IE6 and email is incredibly primitive and unforgiving. Webmail is even worse. I learned JavaScript when I was involuntarily reassigned from a design job to a developer job. I just had to figure it out. I learned to write code in an imperative functional way because I didn’t have prior bad practices and I didn’t want a bunch of vanity decoration. Lately I have been maintaining an OS GUI in the browser. It turned out to be easier and faster without a framework. Less is more when there are many moving parts and competing concerns. What helped me the most with this is good test automation against user events in the browser. I was able to write my own tool to do this and so long as the page was served from localhost I didn’t have to mess with the complexities of CDP.

swyx 4y ago

study and compile every bit of advice that people hand out and make it easy to retrieve on demand: https://github.com/sw-yx/spark-joy https://github.com/sw-yx/spark-joy

staticBr 4y ago
Thanks mate, that is a nice compilation in this repo!

cpursley 4y ago

I've gotten a lot of mileage out of following Victor Ponamariov: - https://user-interface.io https://user-interface.io - https://hundred.user-interface.io https://hundred.user-interface.io <- this is especially good - https://twitter.com/vponamariov https://twitter.com/vponamariov <- he often has great threads

sbmthakur 4y ago

The case-studies by Growth.Design have been pretty helpful. https://growth.design/case-studies https://growth.design/case-studies

onion2k 4y ago

What helped you increase your UX skills? I started caring about users. I decided that I genuinely want them to enjoy using what I build - not in a "hey that's cool" or "ooo that's beautiful" way, but in a "wow, doing that sucky task I have to do every day is a bit less sucky now" way. I put effort in to solving hard problems so I can make users lives a bit easier. It turns out that thinking this way also makes my job more fun.

matwood 4y ago
This is what I was going to say, but even simpler...give a shit how the UI/UX works and looks. That means thinking about the details and how something is really used.

hyperman1 4y ago

Give your program to a real user. Ask them to do a task. Shut up, look, and watch 'm squirm. Keep up for an hour. If you start assuming this particular user must be braindead and failed basic logic, repeat with a new real user until the lesson sinks in. Realize your crystal-clear design has in fact plenty of holes, and user will curse your name if you release now. Bang head against wall for therapeutic value (your head, not theirs). Congrats, you're now an UX expert. I did it once. Turned out my understanding of the real core problem was deeply flawed. UPDATE: Maybe interesting to give some details of this. I was developing a program everybody called the calendar. Basically there's a list of people, and they need to have a timeslot each somewhere in the next year. Customer was the people who scheduled these time slots. First version of the calendar app was ... a calendar. Columns monday tuesday wednesday ..., rows with hours and minutes. Drag a person on top of it and presto. You know the drill. Testing with users revealed something was off. No user could really tell what was wrong, it looked exactly as they had asked, but everybody agreed this was not it. Somehow, the better design dawned: Even if they called it a calender, they wanted a task list. Not the date/time aspect but the person aspect was central and required most screen estate. They needed to be able to select the right people in the right order, giving priority to some people but also being sure nobody was forgotten. Date/time selection could generally be automated or needed a simple text field so they could quickly type it in. The redesign took about a day. All the business logic and most of the UI widgets could be recycled. Just had to add a dumb list with checkboxes. Nevertheless, it looked completely different when finished, with widgets moved between pages and resized as their importance grew or shrunk. I kept a calendar widget in there out of some kind of residual guilt, but it was almost completely ignored.

deleted 4y ago
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hyperman1 4y ago
Maybe another fun example: Data entry. The state has some official paper form, people want to type it in the computer. So I created a page with fields in a reasonable order: First identification, then contact info, then the different aspects forming the purpose of the form. One day, I manage to acquire an actual form as provided by the state. It turns out to be organically grown and the resulting field order made no sense at all. The first field was a phone number, for some reason. Name and surname were actually on 2 different pages, with lots of stuff in between. No idea how it got so messed up. So I ordered the fields in my form in the same bad order as the state form. Users loved it. The could just tab-tab-tab quickly fill it in.

acarabott 4y ago

You don’t need to build a product in order to user test. You can take an existing product, watch a totally new user use it for the first time, and learn a huge amount. I suggest doing this for a type of software that you know really well, as you’ll be more surprised by your own assumptions.

spaetzleesser 4y ago

I am not a UX guy but I feel a lot of them could benefit from trying to understand their users and what the tool is actually used for. I feel a lot of them have a “I know better” attitude and don’t respect their users.

z3t4 4y ago

Getting feedback from users... And looking at statistics (what they don't tell you will show up in quantity analysis)

zichy 4y ago

Question yourself every step of the way if you are creating barriers for anyone. To get your started, I recommend this short summary about universal design, inclusive design, and accessibility: https://sayyeah.com/digital-insights/universal-design-accessibility-inclusive-design/ https://sayyeah.com/digital-insights/universal-design-access...

labratmatt 4y ago

Tell yourself and others that you're and empath and that you're human-centered. Seek out like minds and converse with them about interfaces. Do it lots - for years.

bitwize 4y ago

Trying ideas out with an expert in the field. Listening to their criticism. When they, or someone else, is confused by the operation of my work, understand that it could be a UI fail and make efforts to make clearer the communication between application and user. Above all else -- practice. Being a good UI designer is like being a good writer -- your job is to communicate all that your audience needs to know, without overwhelming, confusing, or distracting them. A balance needs to be struck. What, in any given moment, does the user need to know? How do you arrange that information so that it's clear? How do you present the different choices to proceed to the user? It really boils down to, if the user knows at a glance what the situation is and what they can do next, you'll be fine.

PointyFluff 4y ago

Firstly, by not calling it "UX".

staticBr 4y ago
Okay, enlighten me. What would be correct and why?

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

sbf501 4y ago

UX is very much rooted in both industrial design and psychology. I would highly recommend taking design courses in college, it will help hone your eye for how to perceive a task through a given experience. Contrary to popular belief, UX has nothing to do with software: UX is just the sexy new term. It all stems from design, and was studied heavily in the early 20th century onwards. Look at a can-opener, for example, or the classic Jerry-can from WW2. It is about how humans interact with the world through design.

spurgu 4y ago

Simply getting annoyed by websites I've browsed over the years.

frozenlettuce 4y ago

I think that using systems with bad UX teaches you a lot on what not to do. I was unlucky/lucky to use Lotus Notes for about 4 years, and that changed my perception on how much suffering software can inflict on its users. If you have a friend/relative that happens to work with it, try interviewing them.

bmitc 4y ago
Lol. Good ol' Lotus Notes. I think it's safe to say that Lotus Notes has no UX other than the UX that emerges from its ad hoc nature as a piece of software. I wish I had kept my list of Lotus Notes shenanigans from the time when I worked at a company that used it. I don't think I have ever used a worse piece of software.

devteambravo 4y ago

Read a lot of sketches from this brilliant woman: https://uxknowledgebase.com/ https://uxknowledgebase.com/

mikewarot 4y ago

It was the days of MS-DOS. I had written a program to manage the inspection of Fire Extinguishers in Fossil Fuel generating stations. The Operations manager pulled a random person in, explained to them that he understood they weren't trained for this, and anything that was wrong was MY fault, not theirs. He gave them a list of things to do, and told me to watch and not say anything. The user got stumped at 1 second into the task... and I blurted out "just press F1 for help"... to which the reply was "How is he supposed to know that?"... and thus began my education of building appropriate user interfaces. F1 was ALWAYS on the screen after that, and I learned lots of things about the differences between someone just trying to get a job done, and my view of computers.

mrcartmeneses 4y ago

I took a course tonight by Bruce “Tog” Tognazzini from Nielsen Norman group. He’s fantastic. The course was great. I came away with a lot of useful tools and a change in my mindset

Kalanos 4y ago

play lots of video games

indymike 4y ago

This: Work, like, love. Build something that works. Then make it likable. After that, go for lovable.

balls187 4y ago

Been taking UX Academy Foundations course from Design Lab. It's already been well worth the cost and effort. https://designlab.com/ https://designlab.com/

6510 4y ago

You look at it again, you again scream inside your head: So, what is the user actually trying to do? Then you hate on your previous solution until you are convinced it is terrible. The only thing it has going for it self is that people are now used to your terrible thing. If you are going to change it it better be dramatically better. You have 100 ideas that should all be considered bad. You prototype a few of them and try to convince yourself you've made it worse. If this fails you try to convince yourself the improvement is not big enough. If this fails you make more prototypes. If you are going to screw with peoples muscle memory you want larger gains out of the mistake. Then you put it live, if enough people hate it you revert it back to the original version. If more people complaint how the new version was actually better you go back to the drawing board. If no one cares however, then you've done a good job. Listen to feedback but don't involve the users outside live testing, they don't have the hate one can project on ones own work. If they could give useful feedback it is something obvious that you convince yourself you should have seen. edit: Dogfooding is good but mind the learning curve. Dogfooding might actually be required to approach perfection.

inshadows 4y ago

Just make fonts gray, put as little content on as much screen area as possible, and include some Corporate Memphis around.

Golf101 4y ago

I am sponsored by my company to complete a UX certificate for my continued learning goal. The beautiful thing about it is since my company is aware of my learning, not only that they support me financially but also positively look for opportunities that I can apply what I learn to real-life projects. That helps me learn and improve my UX mindset significantly over the time. So I would say taking UX courses, reading related articles, books, resources are important but the key tip is searching for projects (personal or professional) to apply what you learn as soon as possible. It should never be too soon or “I don’t think I am ready yet”. You got it.

viggity 4y ago

The Science of Great UI is an amazeballs course. Like knock you on your ass amazing. I could not recommend it enough. Mark Miller is a genius. http://www.sgui.com/ http://www.sgui.com/

lproven 4y ago

Mu number 1 tip from some 20 years of watching UI design evolve: Design that is more accessible for users with disabilities is more accessible for everyone. The first level of this is easy, but few do it. Step 1: use a desktop PC. Windows or Linux as you prefer, but not a Mac, and not a laptop. Step 2: unplug the mouse. Learn to do everything with the keyboard. The WWW is a pain but most other things are easy, but you'll need to learn the keystrokes. Few know them these days. Windows is good at this, and you'll quickly discover that most Linux desktops are poor. (For me, Xfce is about the best.) Spend a week working like this. You will discover a tonne of stuff about UI design you never noticed before. Step 3: for the most advanced users only. Now you are used to working without a pointing device, install a screenreader -- NVDA for Windows is good and free. Now, unplug your screen. Learn to work with keyboard and sound only. I am part way through learning this and it's savage, but it's like learning to play chess blindfold. Once you have the patterns in your head, you discover that you don't need to see them and you can still be fast and efficient. But steps 1 & 2 will put you in the 1% of best UI designers there are in the world today.

zepolen 4y ago

Everyone will tell you to read a bunch of books or look at how others use your product. There is a simple secret to a great UX. USE YOUR OWN PRODUCT. Ignore designers, they have no idea what a UX is about. Pretty != Workflow. Workflow is king. Find something you do all the time that takes 5 steps. Make it 1. Find something that annoys you? Fix it. Find something that's slow? Make it fast. Find something that confuses you? Make it clearer. That's all you need for a good UX.

balls187 4y ago
That’s funny. The first message I got from my mentor was “Good design is more than making something look pretty.”

maydemir 4y ago

Some people recommend taking a course or reading books on UX design, but I believe the best way to improve your skills is to get out there and practice. Try designing simple apps or websites, and get feedback from friends or family. Use online resources to learn more about specific UX concepts, and then apply what you've learned to your own designs. With enough practice, you'll start to develop a good sense of what makes a good user experience.

taf2 4y ago

Try explaining how to use your UI to someone over the phone without sharing screens.

lienhoangduy 4y ago

There are many ways to improve your UX skills. I've gotten to know UX here for 6 years. I'd start to research all the things about UX, try to learn from the foundation to advance knowledge, I found all the things related to UX on the internet, join the designer community (Facebook, Reddit...) to learn from each other and senior guys. Besides that, UI UX design tool can be very helpful to practice your skills, such as Figma (for pro player), Balsamiq, Miro, Visily (for newbie).