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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?

#71

Post by rchaud »

barbecue_sauce wrote: post #20
iamunr wrote: post #3

https://refactoringui.com/ Just came out yesterday, doesn't necessarily teach 'from scratch' UI, but a great aide.

I'm reticent to pay $150 dollars for a PDF without a print copy.

Yup, I was excited about the book, and then I saw it was PDF only.

One of my favorite books as a "hobbyist" web dev (my real job is in reporting and analytics) is Jon Duckett's HTML/CSS and JavaScript/Jquery books. Gorgeously designed ink-and-paper books that give you a truly visual understanding of the box model, floats, functions, loops etc. The combination of visual design and easy-to-understand examples make the book a constant reference for me.

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

#72

Post by OJFord »

mortenjorck wrote: post #23
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…

I don’t teach UX design, but if I did, Norman’s The Design of Everyday Things would be the first assigned reading. I’ve even recommended it to friends who aren’t looking to transition into design, but just want a better understanding of the discipline for the occasional departmental web page, etc. If you want to focus on visual language, iconography, and how graphics communicate, an unconventional, yet highly-regarde…

I took a course on HCI (at Imperial, Professor Robert Spence) and it _was_ the first 'assigned' reading, definitely recommend - and it's actually a pretty good stocking/'secret santa' present this time of year for anyone even idly curious about things and how they work.

I'd also highly recommend Spence's own book: Information Visualisation. I don't work in HCI/UX at all, but I enjoyed it a lot; it does an excellent job of showing that it's much more than 'just' (sorry!) artsy design.

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

#73

Post by mrighele »

pureliquidhw wrote: post #48
1023bytes wrote: post #37

This seems like guerilla marketing for refactoringui.com

Seeing a lot of healthy, regular accounts promoting it as well. I wonder if they gave it away for a comment on HN or something. Sad that I'm spending any time checking the legitimacy of this post and those posting in it. Thanks advert industry for making me so cynical.

It really is a great book. I think it is recommended by many people simply because it is not a technical book and can be easily understood by everybody.

I'm not a designer but it really changed the way I think when I have to write any user interface.

It will not teach you how to make the perfect UX, but after reading it you will know how to avoid the most common and obvious mistakes. I would consider the minimum recommended for anybody that has to design any kind of UI.

Also, you will recognize all the issues in every thing you interact with, be it the door of your apartment or the coffee machine of your office (the name is really apt). I think you should read it even if you will never have to do any kind of UX work, because you will have to put up with somebody's else interface.

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

#74

Post by michaelmrose »

nathan_f77 wrote: post #56
1023bytes wrote: post #37

This seems like guerilla marketing for refactoringui.com

Haha I actually opened this thread intending to post it. It looks really good so I'm thinking about buying it.

Beginning a post with haha is off putting and awkward. Can you imagine starting a response in real life by randomly inserting laughter?

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

#75

Post by keithnz »

mrighele wrote: post #73
pureliquidhw wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seeing a lot of healthy, regular accounts promoting it as well. I wonder if they gave it away for a comment on HN or something. Sad that I'm spending any time checking the legitimacy of this post and those posting in it. Thanks advert industry for making me so cynical.

It really is a great book. I think it is recommended by many people simply because it is not a technical book and can be easily understood by everybody. I'm not a designer but it really changed the way I think when I have to write any user interface. It will not teach you how to make the perfect UX, but after reading it you will know how to avoid the most common and obvious mistakes. I would consider the minimum reco…

"The design of everyday things" would be the book to read about that kind of stuff. It's a classic and very good, I would consider that a possible "minimum"

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

#76

Post by rchaud »

colinjoy wrote: post #59
iamunr wrote: post #3

https://refactoringui.com/ Just came out yesterday, doesn't necessarily teach 'from scratch' UI, but a great aide.

This is to UX/IxD literature what „just add water“ meals are to cooking. A collection of patterns you can copy. To really make it worth while you‘d have to look behind the presented patterns and ask why they work (and when they won‘t). This, you can also do by looking at real products in the wild. For $249 (fake price anchor, I know) you can get all the classics from Tufte, Cooper and Norman, a bookshelve and a stool…

While I agree with your analogy, it is entirely possible to sink an inordinate amount of time into learning design theory with those books, and have absolutely nothing to show for it in terms of a real world website that reflects good design principles in a way that is apparent to the average web user.

I've read "The Design of Everyday Things"; I appreciate its role in providing a kind of philosophical grounding for HCI education. But if I were building product to compete in the same space as Robinhood, or Airbnb, that book wouldn't tell me a damn thing about how to design a UI that engages users. And increasingly, a lot of "engagement" comes down to whether or not the app "feels" like a premium experience.

Unfortunately that feeling isn't something you can recreate by reading about the circumstances in which a door would be designed to be push or pull based.

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

#77

Post by TeMPOraL »

stingraycharles wrote: post #69
TeMPOraL wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sad that I'm spending any time checking the legitimacy of this post and those posting in it. Thanks advert industry for making me so cynical. Yet another reason why I consider adverising to be a cancer on society. You have to be suspicious of everything.

If advertising gets to the point of generating actual useful content, I like to think that's a net positive. I learned a lot from this discussion, and good content marketing actually provides a lot of information.

> I learned a lot from this discussion

That spamming a board with book recommendations can generate an interesting discussion isn't an excuse for spamming a board.

> and good content marketing actually provides a lot of information.

Depending what you mean by "good content marketing". If you mean companies paying people to share their professional knowledge, no strings attached, and writing this off as a "marketing expense", sure it can be good, but that's because it's a form of UBI for the people sharing their knowledge. As for most of the things explicitly created as "content marketing", it's mostly garbage that's wasting your time. It's only meant to give you some tidbits to hook you and position you to further monetization efforts - and the content rarely does anything beyond that. Consider that every time you read a content marketing piece, you could have read a honest article instead, were it not pushed down in SERP by content marketing.

Also, I've worked with people doing content marketing professionally. I wouldn't trust a word from their work. It's not just waste of time, you're probably actively hurting your knowledge.

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

#78

Post by darkwinx »

amelius wrote: post #10
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?

I only know Pencil

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

#79

Post by jwdunne »

moeamaya wrote: post #36
jwdunne wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I saw this advertised on product hunt. Apparently it's a good thing that you can read it in 1.5hrs. Maybe but not with a $79 price tag for a PDF.

It's more of a reference book so you continue earning back that investment over time. You can get a lot of his tips for free here in this curated Twitter Moment: https://twitter.com/i/moments/880688233641848832

I'd happily pay $79 for original content _in print_ that delves into why each of those tips works the way they do (you can connect each of those tips to fundamental principles of design, for example).

But for a compilation of tweets in a PDF? There are renowned books that go for less than that. I got 3 hard back volumes of Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming for around £70. Is this book of that caliber?

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

#80

Post by xtracto »

tonycoco wrote: post #38

The Visual Display of Quantitative Information: Edward R. Tufte Ways to Connect: On Interface and Product Design, Ryan Singer Something on color theory Design language books (Bauhaus, etc) The entire Google design team has quite a few open resources: https://material.io/design/ and https://design.google

I read Tufte during my PhD and it was a lifesaver. It is good in many levels: Not only for the lessons in doing good graphics, but also on the history of charts. (I was surprised by the history of the first scatterplot)
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