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This seems like guerilla marketing for refactoringui.com
It does seem a little strange given that their book came out yesterday. Of course coincidences can always occur, but the OP’s profile is a bit odd. It’s a 9 day old account that has posted Ask HN questions every day, often multiple times a day.
(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 see this transition in titles all over the place at big SF companies like Adobe, which is disheartening because now I'm expected to have a dribblesque visual/graphic design skill set (least interesting aspect of design imo) with less emphasis on design thinking, more on delivering assets, front-end code and letting UX researchers focus on generative (most interesting)/evaluative (mostly interesting) research to inform us designers on what visual assets to design for developers (so much for that HCI degree!).
I feel like a commodity more often than not when competing with generic 10-week General Assembly UX grads that can throw together a sleek graphic heavy portfolio while my HCI degree is collecting dust because no hiring manager is going to read the pages of user research that back up my design decisions and because I lack the flashy, material designed dribble UI polish that is largely an exercise in branding, typography, and basic color theory than actually understanding user needs through traditional UX methods based on best practices.
The exception is at larger companies like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google who appreciate HCI grads but their projects often relate to advertising or some obscure product platform I could care less about. Maybe it's time to throw in the towel? Maybe I'm burnt out working on the usability of legacy products and making it look nice with the latest material design trends on top.
I'm interested in working on/solving big, "wicked" problems through UX design like self driving cars or improving healthcare. Should I get a PhD in HCI and focus on something fulfilling rather than improving the UX of boring SaaS CRUD apps?
→ "Sketching User Experiences", Bill Buxton
→ "The Elements of Typographic Style", Robert Bringhurst
→ "Understanding Comics", Scott McCloud
There are lots of books on concrete design methodologies and particular aspects of the field, but they tend to become dated rather quickly. If they are tied to specific technologies, they become dated even faster.
Having said that, a clear and concise introduction to the modern design process is:
→ "Designing for Interaction", Dan Saffer
(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…
The practical application of the principle is that space outside an element should be unambiguously larger than inner parts of the element, for the element to look like an integrated entity. This simply describes how human visual perception works.
This works on all scales, from typography to graphical design to layout, even architecture. For letter spacing, kerning, line spacing, margins—apply the rule. Space between letters is obviously smaller than letters, space between words is comparable to a letter, line spacing is smaller than a line so a paragraph doesn't fall apart, margins are larger than a letter (at the least). Margins outside an element's borders are larger than padding inside.
Need to pinpoint visual balance of some stuff? Consult the rule. Some things are related? Make them closer to each other than to other stuff. Bottom margin of a heading should be smaller than the top one, dammit. Margins of a list item should be larger than line spacing in it.
Learn to see and apply this principle, and you'll have no problem envisioning good design in monochrome.
As a side effect, you'll forever wonder why some desktop UI designers insist on separating things with noisy bars instead of empty space, seeing as the latter is hardwired in our brains.
The next hella useful thing to learn is how to graphically separate layers of information, to allow people to see some related stuff and ignore everything else, instead of seeing all things at once and noticing nothing. This is where monochrome and monotonous designs break. (Also map designers love this.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Very similar to how one could be very productive by glueing together stackoverflow snippets and random 3rd party modules for a while, but once the first tough problem arises it is a lost cause.
With code that is usually tangible in form of a bug or performance issue.
With design, it might still tick all the „look and feel“ boxes and yet be utterly broken.
„The design of everday things“ is often recommended because it is so relatable even for readers with no expertise in the field. This is not to say that reading it is sufficient to make you a capable designer.
(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…
> 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. As a graduate of University of Washington's Human Centered Design and Engineering (HCDE) master's program, I would recommend that if you are interested in understanding 'what' makes a good UI or UX instead of 'how' to…
How has HCI given you an advantage over a UX bootcamp grad that can speak the lingo and mastered Photoshop/sketch?
(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…