Ask HN: How did you increase your UX skills?

The case-studies by Growth.Design have been pretty helpful.

https://growth.design/case-studies

Your site is down buddy

The best thing I ever did was just sit and watch people use my software. You can get very deep into theory and psychology, and that stuff is fun and useful, but at the end of the day I got learned more ROI on my time from watching people use my software than anything else I did. Ideally, you're just a fly on the wall, but even if you aren't it's still a useful data source.

This is what I was going to say, but even simpler...give a shit how the UI/UX works and looks. That means thinking about the details and how something is really used.

Give your program to a real user. Ask them to do a task. Shut up, look, and watch 'm squirm. Keep up for an hour. If you start assuming this particular user must be braindead and failed basic logic, repeat with a new real user until the lesson sinks in. Realize your crystal-clear design has in fact plenty of holes, and user will curse your name if you release now. Bang head against wall for therapeutic value (your head, not theirs). Congrats, you're now an UX expert.

I did it once. Turned out my understanding of the real core problem was deeply flawed.

UPDATE: Maybe interesting to give some details of this. I was developing a program everybody called the calendar. Basically there's a list of people, and they need to have a timeslot each somewhere in the next year. Customer was the people who scheduled these time slots.

First version of the calendar app was ... a calendar. Columns monday tuesday wednesday ..., rows with hours and minutes. Drag a person on top of it and presto. You know the drill.

Testing with users revealed something was off. No user could really tell what was wrong, it looked exactly as they had asked, but everybody agreed this was not it.

Somehow, the better design dawned: Even if they called it a calender, they wanted a task list. Not the date/time aspect but the person aspect was central and required most screen estate. They needed to be able to select the right people in the right order, giving priority to some people but also being sure nobody was forgotten. Date/time selection could generally be automated or needed a simple text field so they could quickly type it in.

The redesign took about a day. All the business logic and most of the UI widgets could be recycled. Just had to add a dumb list with checkboxes. Nevertheless, it looked completely different when finished, with widgets moved between pages and resized as their importance grew or shrunk. I kept a calendar widget in there out of some kind of residual guilt, but it was almost completely ignored.