

Ask HN: How did you learn the details of User Experience? - random42

I am a server side developer, who needs to learn about UX (for pet project).
Unlike everything that I learned in my life by self study, I find learning about details of UI/UX most difficult.
I more so believe that "studying" learning resources would not do a great deal of help in learning about user experience.<p>What are the effective ways to improve one's abilities on UX front?
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bigohms
I spent most of my young designer/developer career primarily interested in all
things UI/UX. Have done the early NielsenNorman UI/UX stuff, read countless
books/blogs/etc & even gotten a couple "certifications" ( worst personal waste
of my time). There are three elements that have contributed the most to my
understanding of UX:

1) Gut instinct on what will work the best in a given scenario based on
personal creativity (have designed 2-3xx number of concepts) as well as the
collective of ideas/concepts/apps/widgets/scripts/designs floating around
communities that just "work well" or solve "pain in the_ issues".

2) Iterative trial, testing based on functional page-level KPIs for a given
scenario such as time-to-action, conversion, drop-off, hit errors, I've even
tested for which pixel hit areas of a graphic button get the best responses.
Learned lessons contributing to 1)

3) Any concepts/assessments rooted from hard psychological research in the
fields of HCI/Industrial Psych from which I can use to contribute to practices
in 1) and 2). These points of knowledge allow me to substantiate claims and
advocate for improvement (particularly if I'm working on sensitive or mission-
critical applications--finance, defense, health).

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kls
There is a discipline that a lot of people that hold themselves out to be UX
professionals have never heard of. it is called Human Factors and is a subset
of industrial psychology.

If a person has never read a book on Human Factor theory, they are not a UX
professional they are a design hack.

Human Factors focuses on what the mind wants to do rather than individual
opinions of how one thinks it should work. There are years of scientific
method based research in Human Factors studies that is willfully or ignorantly
ignored by the web design community.

If you want to be great you need to ground yourself in Human Factors as well
as aesthetic design. They are different disciplines and both are important to
user experience. As well a subset of human factors specifically focused on
computing is HCI, while you can short cut and just read HCI related info,
there is a wealth of info that can be drawn upon from other elements of Human
Factors such as product design, and ergonomics while not directly related the
theories can be adapted to UI usability.

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mschaecher
Any recommended reading on Human Factors?

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kls
Handbook of Human Factors and Ergonomics

The Human-Computer Interaction Handbook

Human Factors in Information Systems

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seasoup
The same way one learns about anything. Learn it, do it, teach it.

Learn it by reading a book on it, or taking a class.

Do it by putting into place the practices you just learned about, actually
doing the user tests and see what people think about it.

Teach it by showing others, explaining things will force you to learn them
deeper.

One place you can start is here: <http://52weeksofux.com>

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wmwong
The last part about teaching is hard for me. I always feel that in order to
teach, you must be an expert. Since I'm not an expert yet, I feel I might be
teaching the wrong things and/or I can't answer their questions. This fear has
stopped me several times from brain-dumping my knowledge. And since I don't
teach, I never become an expert. A horrible cycle! Any ideas how to start?

Plus thanks for the link. More reading material!

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vitovito
I started my design workshops because they were the kind of thing I wanted to
attend: a sort of Toastmasters for UX where I could do exercises in different
parts of UX and eventually become an expert across the board.

Instead, I learned a lot about effective teaching, a lot about effective
exercise design, a lot about facilitation and a lot about how much effort went
into such things.

The things I learned about UX were more about really digging into things I
thought I knew, since invariably I would spend 8-16 hours before the workshop
researching, preparing and running through the exercises myself to make sure
they'd fit in the time allotted and provide the information I wanted to
convey.

I believe there's a big demand for this sort of thing out there. I'm
absolutely not an expert in any of the things I taught, but neither will be
most of your attendees. Doing it, trying it, learning from it and building the
community is just as valuable and will teach you a lot.

<http://vi.to/workshop/> is my effort, including a couple of write-ups, and
the Facebook group has links to some of the notes and such as well.

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RDDavies
I feel the same way about design, and I know they're closely related, so I'm
anxious to see the responses here too.

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random42
Some good case studies.

<http://www.happycog.com/create>

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lovskogen
Lots of articles. And experiencing great products. Also, design patterns.

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abrudtkuhl
Dig into your favorite UI's

