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Ask HN: How did you increase your UX skills?

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Re: Ask HN: How did you increase your UX skills?

#101

Post by 6510 »

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.

Re: Ask HN: How did you increase your UX skills?

#103

Post by pmontra »

eternityforest wrote: post #32

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 a…

> Next up, white space. It really is important. Packing 200k things on screen will annoy everyone.

My favorite rebuttal is Excel. Imagine Excel with no more than 10 well spaced buttons in the tool bar and a quarter inch padding around every cell. Totally unusable for most of the things we do with it.

Re: Ask HN: How did you increase your UX skills?

#104

Post by hulitu »

mattferderer wrote: post #30
sonofhans wrote: post #20

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 physiolog…

1 & 4 go together very well. The biggest mistake I have witnessed, is a person putting work into a design until they thought it was "perfect/finished/happy with it" & were ready to show off. They're going in expecting people to tell them how good their UX is, even if they won't admit it. As soon as someone struggles with it, you can see the original designer getting defensive or suggesting to the person testing to tr…

> I think a tool like Microsoft Excel is a great thought process for UX. I'm not saying it's perfect. But you have a product with such a wide audience experience range

Today MS UX, UI whatever they call it, is a destitute, a failed embryo. Using it every day is an exercise in masochism. Try to resize a window element with 1px width on a UHD monitor. And i repeat myself: light gray on black ? Really want to learn something from MS: see win32 until win 2000 and office untill office 97. And waiting 1s for every cell in excell to advance is a ... problem, not a UX advance.

Re: Ask HN: How did you increase your UX skills?

#105

Post by hulitu »

sneusse wrote: post #26
sonofhans wrote: post #20

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 physiolog…

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.

Yes, most people are idiots. Ever thought that for those people to "articulate what they really want" means for you to try to undestand them and to speak their (technical) language ?

Re: Ask HN: How did you increase your UX skills?

#106

Post by hulitu »

mmcdermott wrote: post #36
sonofhans wrote: post #20

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 physiolog…

There are days where I would (somewhat tongue in cheek) say that UX is more anthropology than psychology.

UX is more like a vegetable soup.

Re: Ask HN: How did you increase your UX skills?

#107

Post by boloust »

Anaminus wrote: post #98
blackRust wrote: post #48

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

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 t…

> 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.

Re: Ask HN: How did you increase your UX skills?

#108

Post by sneusse »

hulitu wrote: post #105
sneusse wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, most people are idiots. Ever thought that for those people to "articulate what they really want" means for you to try to undestand them and to speak their (technical) language ?

That’s what I was trying to say. It’s our job to read what they need instead of trying to do exactly as they say

Re: Ask HN: How did you increase your UX skills?

#109

Post by sneusse »

CornCobs wrote: post #88
sneusse wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I disagree in general with your second point. Yeah, sure, this could make sense in some situations, but many tools and products exist for the sole reason that they offer a superior workflow and smoother experience than their existing counterparts. Wasn't there that classic HN post about users not needing Dropbox because any Linux user could do the same with rsync?

Sure, if you’re replacing functionality/processes then you’re right.

I was thinking of adding/integrating new processes. That’s imho the harder task because you usually have less data to work with.

Re: Ask HN: How did you increase your UX skills?

#110

Post by hulitu »

Wistar wrote: post #76
mmcdermott wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are days where I would (somewhat tongue in cheek) say that UX is more anthropology than psychology.

At Microsoft, I can recall several UX/UI user studies that were conducted by two anthropologists. Although I don't recall exactly the studies, I know they had to do with future UI/UX concepts.

Too bad they didn't use a computer so they can see what they did.
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