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Ask HN: What's the best book on modern UI/UX?

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Re: Ask HN: What's the best book on modern UI/UX?

#2

Post by tejcirkulate »

1. Contextual design, holzblat How to understand and structure a user's life and environment and what to look for when they are struggling with a problem or using your product.

2. Lean Customer Development, Cindy Alvarez Practical and immediately useful guide to interviewing and talking to users. Read after the Contextual Inquiry book above. If that book teaches what to understand about a user's workflow and environment, this one teaches how to elicit those answers from customers when talking to them.

3. About Face 3, alan cooper If the previous two are about (a) what to look for when understanding a customer and (b) how to get the info you need to build solutions for those customers, then this book is about translating those learnings into user journeys and experiences.

Re: Ask HN: What's the best book on modern UI/UX?

#5

Post by acconrad »

I think these guys just put out a book which I'm intrigued to read: https://refactoringui.com/book/

If you're looking for something more bite-sized, I offer a mini course on getting the bare bones established for modern UIs: https://anonconsulting.com/ui-crash-course/ (pardon the SSL cert issue I need to resolve)

Re: Ask HN: What's the best book on modern UI/UX?

#7

Post by jasonhong »

(For background, I'm a faculty at Carnegie Mellon University in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute)

For best books, it depends on if you want to understand users or do implementation. But generally, I'd highly recommend Don Norman's The Design of Everyday Things to improve how you look at the world, and Steve Krug's Don't Make Me Think for simple and practical design tips.

For tools, the best is paper prototyping, where you have your team just draw it out on paper and simulate the UI. It's simple, fast, and cheap, and from a cognitive perspective, you can explore more of the design space (think breadth-first search instead of depth-first), and you don't get overly attached to your designs.

In my course on UX design, we also use Balsamiq and InVision, though other tools seem fine (e.g. Marvel, Figma, etc). One of our alums created this great chart comparing different prototyping tools: https://www.cooper.com/prototyping-tools

For schools, some to check out would be Georgia Tech, University of Washington's Master's of HCI, Indiana University, University of Michigan iSchool, and (of course) Carnegie Mellon's Master's of HCI.

And lastly, here's a slide deck I put together and used at my startup several years ago. It was intended as a short 1-hour crash course. https://www.slideshare.net/jas0nh0ng/01-1hourcrashcourseuxhc...

Re: Ask HN: What's the best book on modern UI/UX?

#8

Post by uxcolumbo »

I think what you're asking is more about UI Design.

You should have a look at these:

https://designcode.io/sketch-learn (if you're on Windows have a look at their Figma courses)

https://hackdesign.org/

To learn more about UX, this is a good start

https://rosenfeldmedia.com/books/the-user-experience-team-of...

Re: Ask HN: What's the best book on modern UI/UX?

#10

Post by amelius »

jasonhong wrote: post #7

(For background, I'm a faculty at Carnegie Mellon University in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute) For best books, it depends on if you want to understand users or do implementation. But generally, I'd highly recommend Don Norman's The Design of Everyday Things to improve how you look at the world, and Steve Krug's Don't Make Me Think for simple and practical design tips. For tools, the best is paper prototypi…

Are any of those prototyping tools open source and free?
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