Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 162 posts

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

#121

Post by spyckie2 »

sizzle wrote: post #82
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…

Any insight into the trend of UX designer --> Product designer? 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 (m…

I attribute the titles being a mess because of the 'newness' of the web/tech era and the specific design challenges.

There is a design pyramid which unfortunately build on top of each other for the majority of business use cases:

Graphic Designer -> UI Designer -> UX Designer -> Product Design -> Service Design

These are the levels of the pyramid at which the design process revolves around, depending on the need, for most products or services:

Visuals -> Web -> Experience -> Product -> Service

The narrative of it closely mirrors the history of many orgs:

Visuals: Hey our website looks like a database written by engineers, maybe we can make it pretty?

UI -> hey, we really need it to look like it belongs on the web, not just a RISD grad's art project, let's get someone who understands web design

UX -> okay, now our site looks like every other site. But no one uses it because it's still just a database with lipstick. Let's get some experience designers in here to make it better.

Product -> Okay, now our site has some nice experiences... but they are all disjointed and random and don't account for business needs... Let's get some product designers in here.

Service -> Okay, our product now is pretty cohesive and quite good... but there's a whole realm of things we have to do outside our product (Customer Service, service processes) that suck and are bringing the user experience down as a whole. Let's get some service designers in here...

In my opinion, this is the way most businesses think about design.

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

#122

Post by pcmaffey »

rpedela wrote: post #107
kyaghmour wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I may offer a contrarian viewpoint, I very much disliked Norman's book. I'm no UX professional, but I was looking for a pragmatic guide to understanding design and instead I was put off by his condescending tone and typecasting of engineers as somehow being innately unable to understand users. That was especially true of the earlier chapters of the book that were apparently first published in the original early '9…

I'm going to offer a contrarian contrarian viewpoint. I certainly agree that engineers should not be shut out of the process, by default. There are some engineers who are good at UI design, like you and me, and their deep technical knowledge helps them invent unique solutions. However most engineers aren't and I wouldn't expect them to be either. I went out of my way to learn UI design and psychology, but most engine…

Super contrarian view - information architecture is the most fundamental aspect of product design. And a database "backend" represents the atomic model for a product's IA (with API being the next layer).

Perhaps the engineer was contributing something crucial to the product design, you just couldn't grok it.

Product design is so much more than UI/UX, fwiw.

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

#124

Post by whoisjuan »

whitepoplar wrote: post #118
currysausage wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ironically from the same author: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18614071

I don't understand why I'm being downvoted. I follow one of the authors on Twitter (Steve Schoger) and I think his design tips are fantastic. I haven't purchased the book (yet) as I think it's a bit spendy, but I have so much admiration for Steve and Adam, so I'm sharing here.

You're being downvoted because of the unfortunate timing of this post and the potential commercial bias of your answer.

People come to HN to discuss things that hold real intellectual value and not to get subtle ads. Suggesting an e-book that was released yesterday looks like blatant advertising even if that's not your intention.

I really find hard to believe that someone can legitimately recommend and stand behind a book that was released yesterday, just because the author teased his/her Twitter followers with some of the book's potential content. Also, how can you objectively say that this book "Is the best UI actionable advice" when you already accepted that you haven't even read it yet?

Sorry, but the question is "What's the best book on modern UI/UX?". Suggesting something that was released in the last 48 hours feels very disingenuous.

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

#125

Post by nikanj »

michaelmrose wrote: post #74
nathan_f77 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Have you ever been to the southern parts of the US? A lot of sentences start with ”Hehe, well...” down there.

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

#128

Post by ternaryoperator »

moltar wrote: post #58
PascLeRasc wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That book made me start getting annoyed at bad design like Norman Doors (doors that require a "push" or "pull" label instead of being intuitive).

And tea pots that leak! It was supposed to do one thing ...

How about kettles? A container that whistles when your water boils. The never-ending list of errors: handles that are in the wrong place, whistles that don't whistle, underside heat distribution plates that come apart, lids that become wedged tight. After the centuries we've had to perfect kettles, you'd think a reliable design could have emerged by now.

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

#129

Post by 1wu »

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…

Hi Jason,

I'm familiar with the academic research in paper prototyping (for background, I have a Ph.D. in CS [HCI], have been a HCI course assistant, and published in academic HCI/design conferences).

To say that paper prototyping is the best implies a certain design philosophy, team structure, and organizational culture. It requires a certain buy-in, level of trust, and design pace that are not appropriate for all industries. There are reasons why most professional UI/UX design tools go to the pixel level, and why sketching interfaces never took off in practice.

That said, there are great benefits to paper, prototyping, and sketching skills. But there are also drawbacks which are not immediately obvious in reading the research literature or taking academic HCI classes.

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

#130

Post by whitepoplar »

whoisjuan wrote: post #124
whitepoplar wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand why I'm being downvoted. I follow one of the authors on Twitter (Steve Schoger) and I think his design tips are fantastic. I haven't purchased the book (yet) as I think it's a bit spendy, but I have so much admiration for Steve and Adam, so I'm sharing here.

You're being downvoted because of the unfortunate timing of this post and the potential commercial bias of your answer. People come to HN to discuss things that hold real intellectual value and not to get subtle ads. Suggesting an e-book that was released yesterday looks like blatant advertising even if that's not your intention. I really find hard to believe that someone can legitimately recommend and stand behind a…

I didn't say the book is the best actionable UI advice, I said http://refactoringui.com is, whose content is free. All I said about the book is that it's available if you seem to like all the other content. I made no comment about how good the book is, as I haven't bought it, but I think it's fair to assume it's an extension of the rest of their work.
Post reply on HN