

Ask HN: What do you wish you knew about UI/UX design? - akrakesh

I'm a UI/UX designer interested in writing about design. I've written about the principles of iOS design, a case study on how I designed an iPhone app, etc., in my blog (http://radesign.in/blog/).<p>Instead of writing what I think is useful I want to write what the audience finds useful. So, what about UI/UX design you wish you knew? What would help you? What do you find interesting? What would you like to know?
======
vitovito
Hi, UX and interaction designer here, but once, a long time ago, I was a
developer.

I learned to program typing in code from books and magazines, and, later, from
reading and rewriting parts of open source projects that did things similar to
things I wanted to do.

There's lots of ways to learn development like that today, online, including
great open source books like _Dive Into Python_ and _Think Python_ and _Learn
Python the Hard Way_.

There isn't so much of that for design. Not online, anyway.

I don't write about "how to design" because, like programming, it's something
you have to learn by doing. There's no _Learn UX the Hard Way_ , but maybe
there should be.

One of the projects I tried once was running design workshops, so I could
tease out repeatable design exercise and publish those:
<http://vi.to/workshop/premise.html> I ran fifteen workshops, and ultimately
discovered they were structured great for the attendees, but wrong for my
goals.

There's a book, _The Non-Designer's Design Book_ , which is pretty
proscriptive, but does give you exercises you can try and repeat. There are
other books, like _Editing By Design_ , which tell you "why" certain things
are important, but doesn't include exercises.

Critique is a related problem: most interactive designers today didn't go to
school for it, so they're missing the common cultural and academic background
that fine artists, architects and industrial designers have, where they've
learned the history of the practice, learned fundamentals, and practiced
constructive criticism for years.

I don't know if you're any good as a writer or a designer, but if you're
looking to write about design and make an impact on non-designers, you could
do worse than to take a design pattern or an element of design and make
exercises around it. Give people ways to practice them, to study an
implementation, to apply it something new, and to critique it, repeatably.

~~~
akrakesh
Thanks for the excellent suggestion. I'll think about it.

------
waxjar
If you're a good/better than average UI/UX designer, you obviously know
something that other people (including me) don't. It's your job to identify
what that something is, your audience can't really tell you :)

I find that often in things I'm better at then other people, I have a better
understanding of some basic principles, that form a frame of reference and
help me make decisions. I'm sure there are some basic principles that the
average hacker isn't familiar with, so I think that'd be a good starting
point.

I also find that I understand things best if it's written in terms I already
understand, so I can connect it to knowledge I already have. Analogies are
really useful for that.

~~~
akrakesh
Thanks. Asking in HN is one of the ways through which I could identify what
people want :) Your thinking on using analogies exactly reflects mine, thanks
for the suggestion.

------
honkytonkwillie
What design styles or trends piss you off?

