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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?

#41

Post by sonofhans »

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.

Fucking feels like that sometimes, eh? :D You’re right, though! The high end of this is something we rarely approach in software — an observer with a clipboard, sitting in a duck blind in someone’s living room for a week, watching them watch TV.

If you do this right you know your users better than they know themselves. I used to think that was a bullshit turn of phrase, but now I believe it completely. I frequently notice things about people and their work that they’ve never noticed before. There’s a real skill to “close observation from a distance.”

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

#44

Post by bena »

I'm not a UX developer by trade, but I've had to develop UX in my time so I've picked up some things.

It's not about how fast you get to something.

You talk to users and they will go on and on and on about "clicks". Anyone talking to you about the number of clicks doesn't understand UI let alone UX. Making everything "one click" away is how you get those massive button interfaces. It's just information overload and even harder to navigate than something that would take more clicks to navigate.

Another way to think about this is that a book takes many "clicks" to write. And a book that was written in one "click" wouldn't be good to read. Some long books are quick to read and some short books take forever to read. Flow is way more important than number of actions.

Realizing that always shooting for "easier" is a mistake.

Things must flow. Except where they shouldn't. Sometimes you want to actually put in resistance. Sometimes you want to make sure that what a user does is actually what they want to do. You want them acting with purpose and intention. If something has a large effect on the system, you want people to not accidentally do that. The best way to do that is to make it slightly involved.

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

#45

Post by jrockway »

This is not great advice, but I try to make sure I only write software that I use. That way if something is painful to me, I know people that didn't write the code have no chance of being able to use it, so it has to change.

Certainly, in a software engineer's career, you'll often be asked to make things that are not directly useful to you. Force yourself to use them anyway, or you miss that valuable path of getting feedback -- "do I even like it?" If you made it and you don't like it, it's probably not good.

I think this, in general, does yield pretty good results. I think software engineers have much better work tools than other engineers (Emacs is a lot nicer than Solidworks), and that's because you use the tools you make to develop the tools you're making, and get a lot of experience in what it's like to be a user.

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

#46

Post by throwaway0asd »

I learned CSS working email before and after the release of IE7. IE7 had a completely different box model than IE6 and email is incredibly primitive and unforgiving. Webmail is even worse.

I learned JavaScript when I was involuntarily reassigned from a design job to a developer job. I just had to figure it out. I learned to write code in an imperative functional way because I didn’t have prior bad practices and I didn’t want a bunch of vanity decoration.

Lately I have been maintaining an OS GUI in the browser. It turned out to be easier and faster without a framework. Less is more when there are many moving parts and competing concerns. What helped me the most with this is good test automation against user events in the browser. I was able to write my own tool to do this and so long as the page was served from localhost I didn’t have to mess with the complexities of CDP.

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