I basically sent the same question in an e-mail to Amy Hoy last night. She recommended these two books, "The Universal Principles of Design (have to get a used copy) and About Face 3 for interaction design."
Ask HN: Where to look to learn UX/Design
11–20 of 64 posts
Re: Ask HN: Where to look to learn UX/Design
#12My favorite UX books:
The Design of Everyday Things (http://www.amazon.com/Design-Everyday-Things-Donald-Norman/d...)
The Humane Interface (http://www.amazon.com/Humane-Interface-Directions-Designing-...)
Contextual Design (http://www.amazon.com/Contextual-Design-Customer-Centered-In...)
Re: Ask HN: Where to look to learn UX/Design
#13This thread on Quora provides a lot of great advice: http://www.quora.com/How-can-I-learn-to-be-a-good-product-de...
Re: Ask HN: Where to look to learn UX/Design
#14I basically sent the same question in an e-mail to Amy Hoy last night. She recommended these two books, "The Universal Principles of Design (have to get a used copy) and About Face 3 for interaction design."
I own The Universal Principles of Design, and it's an excellent book. Each pair of pages has a description of a principle on the left and some examples of it on the right.
Re: Ask HN: Where to look to learn UX/Design
#15It's worth checking out Don Norman's (the author of The Design of Everyday Things) recommended reading list:
http://www.jnd.org/recommended_readings.html
I have yet to choose a book from the list that didn't leave me feeling much more informed. If you click on a book in the list it jumps to a description of why he thinks someone should read it.
I desperately want to get the Handbook of Human Factors and Ergonomics, but it's just way too expensive:
Re: Ask HN: Where to look to learn UX/Design
#16Many YC startups have stunning design e.g. heroku, wufoo. When you come across a beautiful site, open it in Firebug to see how it was done.
Yes, you can do that but sometimes it's not very obvious if you are not a master with css, html, and photoshop.
Re: Ask HN: Where to look to learn UX/Design
#17"About Face" by Alan Cooper is far-and-away the best book I've read on interaction design.
Don Norman's books are also worth a read (though more difficult to immediately apply to creating software).
For general visual design "The Non-Designers Design Book" by Robin Williams is an excellent tutorial to teach you how to be, as you say, "not horrible".
Re: Ask HN: Where to look to learn UX/Design
#18If you want to understand the psychology of design you need to look for books on "human factors" and not web design books. Human Factors is a scientific discipline that is a subset of IO psychology. While many of the books recommended on this board are good books, some of the authors learned through trial and error without the guidance of the scientific rigor that is provided by Human Factors, while others are just p…
Can you recommend any books on "human factors"?
Re: Ask HN: Where to look to learn UX/Design
#19If you want to understand the psychology of design you need to look for books on "human factors" and not web design books. Human Factors is a scientific discipline that is a subset of IO psychology. While many of the books recommended on this board are good books, some of the authors learned through trial and error without the guidance of the scientific rigor that is provided by Human Factors, while others are just p…
Can you recommend any books on "human factors"?
Handbook of Human Factors in Web Design
Institutionalization of Usability
User Interfaces for All -- expensive but good.
About Face 2.0 -- Good info poorly written I think 3 may be out by now.
Human Factors in Information Systems
Re: Ask HN: Where to look to learn UX/Design
#20Want your UX/Web Design to make money?
Try Web Design for RIO (http://www.amazon.com/Web-Design-ROI-Browsers-Prospects/dp/0...)