Not a book, but if you want to improve your UI just watch as a novice user tries to use your software. You will learn in 10 minutes things it would take a book 10 hours to explain.
Ask HN: Good books or articles on UI design?
71–80 of 91 posts
Re: Ask HN: Good books or articles on UI design?
#72A meta book about the process "Thoughtful interaction design" Löwgren, Stolterman
Re: Ask HN: Good books or articles on UI design?
#73I think it really depends on what you want to do.
1) Want to make user interfaces that are actually useful to people? Read up on product management, UX and interaction design. Important skills: articulating the problem you are solving and for what kind of user, and being able to validate whether your hypothesis is on point. Iterating before committing further resources to building a prototype. Conducting user testing sessions (rocket surgery made easy is a good resource for this).
2) Want to make a specific view / flow of a product inviting and visually appealing? Study visual design and typography.
3) Want to be able to build a functional prototype that looks reasonably good? Study frontend design / development. There are a lot of frameworks that could get you up and running.
IMHO going for (1) and (3) first is smart; if you can't prototype and evaluate a user experience that has a shot in hell of being useful to an actual user, being able to make stuff look pretty is kind of irrelevant (unless you are specializing and collaborating with engineers and UX people). In any of the above cases, at least knowing more precisely what you want to learn will help you do better googling, e.g "best books on visual design" or "best books on interaction design".
Re: Ask HN: Good books or articles on UI design?
#74There are many books talking about UX/UI design, but most of them are quite abstract and do not tell you, when exactly, on which stage of your software development process to apply the knowledge they present. This often leads to a typical mistake done by developers, that I've seen in too many projects, when UI design is considered at later stages of the project, when they are starting coding the UI and all the backen…
I enrolled on the Interaction Design specialisation in November 2015 and worked through the modules until July 2016. On the whole I found the course interesting and often fun, and I feel that I learned quite a lot. Until, that is, the 7th course: Designing, Running, and Analyzing Experiments. This was nine weeks of statistical analysis using steadily more elaborate analytical models. I ground through it and finished with a decent grade (>90% iirc) but it ruined the whole experience, and I had no interest or motivation left to even start the capstone project. Grounding UX in an analytical framework is important, and statistics are necessary for this, but that module was just overkill.
So tldr: the specialisation is a good experience, but make sure you know what you're committing to.
Re: Ask HN: Good books or articles on UI design?
#75"Design for Hackers" from David Kadavy is a really great introduction to design for programmers.
Re: Ask HN: Good books or articles on UI design?
#76Joel Spolsky's "User Interface Design for Programmers" is concise, educational, entertaining... and free (even an easy-to-read all-in-one HTML page): http://www.joelonsoftware.com/uibook/fog0000000249.html Also highly recommend Steve Krug's "Don't Make Me Think" (as others have already commented): http://www.sensible.com/dmmt.html
From Joel Spolskey page: > "Another example from the world of Microsoft Windows is the Alt+Tab key combination which switches to the "next" window. Most users would probably assume that it simply rotates among all available windows. If you have window A, B, and C, with A active, Alt+Tab should take you to B. Alt+Tab again would take you to C. Actually, what happens is that the second Alt+Tab takes you back to A. The…
Alt Shift Tab makes the cycle go backwards.
Re: Ask HN: Good books or articles on UI design?
#77The Visual Display of Quantitative Information - Edward Tufte All UI's are graphs at their heart
> All UI's are graphs at their heart A bit of an overstatement, considering /bin/rm, Amazon Echo, NFC (e.g. Apple Pay), car pedals, shake gestures (e.g. camera activation on Moto X), and keyboard shortcuts (e.g. Win-L to lock the computer). I know, you were probably talking about GUIs specifically, but how you interact with a GUI is not really covered by Tufte. I second the recommendation for The Humane Interface for…
Yes I'll give you that
I have essentially written four mini-essays exploring the topic today in attempts to reply to your message. I'll suffice with:
"All UI's are communicators of quantitative information at heart. And many are shit"
Re: Ask HN: Good books or articles on UI design?
#78Some of the reading list in the UI/UX course at Brown: http://cs.brown.edu/courses/csci1300/ Particularly (free links with pdfs), Don Norman - Design of Everyday Things https://archive.org/details/DesignOfEverydayThings Bill Buxton - Input Manuscript http://www.billbuxton.com/inputManuscript.html Alan Cooper - About Face http://feiramoderna.net/download/pos-positivo/COOPER-Alan/Ab... Vignelli - The Vignelli Canon htt…
Looks like the brown information are locked under an authentication :(
Re: Ask HN: Good books or articles on UI design?
#79Some of the reading list in the UI/UX course at Brown: http://cs.brown.edu/courses/csci1300/ Particularly (free links with pdfs), Don Norman - Design of Everyday Things https://archive.org/details/DesignOfEverydayThings Bill Buxton - Input Manuscript http://www.billbuxton.com/inputManuscript.html Alan Cooper - About Face http://feiramoderna.net/download/pos-positivo/COOPER-Alan/Ab... Vignelli - The Vignelli Canon htt…
Design of everyday object is really great and I cannot recommend it enough.
Udacity also has a mooc that follows the book and is taught by the author
https://www.udacity.com/course/intro-to-the-design-of-everyd...
Re: Ask HN: Good books or articles on UI design?
#80I keep re-reading The UI Audit by Jane Portman: http://uibreakfast.com/audit/ I use it every time I need to craft an interface but especially for SaaS apps. The OP requested something from a 'newbie perspective'; this book will explain the basics but the real value comes from the explanations and advice with respect to why UI decisions lead to happier users. I've copy/pasted the chapter headings from the site: Introd…
Well, I tried to download the sample chapter by entering my email address and clicking "Send Me the Free Chapter". But instead I got subscribed on an email list. So I'm afraid I have to say: that UI really sucks :)
Hey I t's me Jane here :) Sorry to make you go through the signup. Hope it was worth it!