

Ask HN: Best Way to Learn About User Experience - sscheper

I'll try and break this down into a couple sections--hopefully this makes it easier to understand what I'm trying to accomplish and why.<p>My Background: I'm a business guy that got in touch with his inner techness about a year ago.<p>My Skills: Basic html, css, php, mockup software (Balsamiq), nunchucks, obsession with web2<p>My Goal: To create a beautiful, fast, clean user experience for a finance platform. Kind of like etrade.<p>My Question: Would you mind sharing your insight on how to best accomplish the goal of becoming a great user experience developer?<p>Sub-questions:<p>Is there a specific book worth reading re: user experience?<p>How does one become great in this realm?<p>Use cases. Yay or nay?<p>Thanks!
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unalone
A few things that helped me when I was first getting started:

-Join every web site you can. If there's an interface to use, use it. Social networks, social news, blogging platforms, commerce apps... everything.

-If you don't have a good memory, take notes. Write down the things that stand out to you, even if it's not optimal. Write down the things that are _so_ optimal they stand out. Mark down user interface, design choices. Look at how sites do things. Look at how they handle images and typography and white space.

-As you do that, read things like Smashing Magazine and A List Apart. The most important thing is for you to learn to disagree with stuff you read if you think it's wrong. Sometimes you'll disagree with good advice, and in learning why they're giving that advice you'll learn even more. Sometimes you'll agree with something but _other_ people will disagree, and you'll learn from them.

It takes a long time to integrate what you've learned rather than to make
impulsive decisions based on the last things you've seen. That said, there's
nothing to stop you from submitting ideas here or to IRC or emailing people
for advice, and iterating.

Going based on the terms that you specified yourself:

Clean you get by removing the stuff that doesn't matter. Pare down your
features to the bare essentials. If you still have a lot, the challenge is
making it so that that lot doesn't seem like much to the end user. If
something isn't instantly understandable to somebody that wants it, it can be
come better.

Fast is partly a matter of code. In terms of fast _interface_ , clean helps a
lot. Big helps, too, but big is relative. (If you only have one button, make
it huge. If you have a hundred of them, fast means making it as obvious as
possible where the user wants to go.)

Beautiful is the hardest. The one thing that can be said about beautiful is
that once you have it, you'll know, and with any luck it'll excite you and
make you want to skip around a room. Then, if you look at it a week later and
still want to skip, you've got a keeper. (It helps if it makes other people
skippers too.)

I don't know about a specific book. Chris Crawford's _The Art of Interactive
Design_ is pretty good, but it's expensive. Tufte is great for any sort of
related subject, even if he doesn't focus too much on aesthetic.

Here are a few things that've inspired me. Facebook: look at how much they
pack into such a compact interface, and how they vary the look of their pages.
Tumblr: it's getting worse every year, but the registration experience is
pretty amazing, and most of the default blog themes are great instances if
you've never seen Tumblr's blog themes before. Both Flickr and Hunch.com -
Hunch is one of the most beautiful new sites I've ever seen; the attention to
detail is incredible. Hacker News, if you want an instance of how not to waste
an inch of space. Last.fm. It's cliched to say 37signals, but 37signals and
all their apps. The sites of indie Mac developers very often - I was stunned
the first time I saw culturedcode.com, literally* stunned.

Just get into as much as possible and learn what stuff you fall in love with.
The fastest shortcut to becoming a great designer is to fall in love hard and
fast.

*I MEAN literally, as in: I stared blankly at the screen for a handful of seconds and found it hard to breathe. Yes, I know this is an overreaction, but it happened and I've got no reason to be honest about it.

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tokenadult
Yeah, I know he is controversial, but even if you don't agree with everything
he writes, you should consider what Jakob Nielsen's site

<http://www.useit.com/>

says about improving user experiences. I think becoming thoroughly familiar
with Nielsen's writings may not be sufficient for becoming great in the realm
of user experience, but it is necessary to properly understand the current
literature on the subject.

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known
Usability is inversely proportional to the number of mouse clicks required for
the user expected feature.

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sscheper
All (and particularly unalone) --

Thanks for the very insightful information. I really appreciate the assistance
with this. I'll be sure to check out the reads and, most importantly,
view/analyze every site I now come across.

