Ask HN: How to learn UI/UX as a data/BE engineer?

coming from a data/ BE background I feel extremely familiar with reasoning about systems and performance from the cloud-infra to the pipeline stack level. Or I'm super familiar with data visualization.

I feel like falling off a cliff when trying to extrapolate that knowledge to the more customer-facing world.

Despite having some tool ideas in the past, I realized I shy away from going towards the front end because I really lack any conecptual frame of how to think about and subsequently implement UI or UX.

I don't mean that in a nitty-gritty-designer focussed way but more like first-principle understanding:

What makes a good color scheme?

What makes a great wording and why?

What's a good form of presenting information?

I feel like I can recognize good UI/UX when I see it (as is often the case with HN company LPs), but I'd totally fail at distilling check boxes that such good examples tick.

Any pointers to how I can learn about these worlds and develop an understanding of what principles UI/UX should follow?

Staying within the bounds of data/be engineer aka the how, on-line courses / domain specific language use cases aka css, html

[0] : https://www.springboard.com/blog/design/ux-design-principles...

UI-wise I second the recommendation of starting with an existing component library. Bootstrap is still a good start.

UX-wise - which would be the process of determining the process, I recommend taking a look at the “breadboarding” approach as described here.

https://basecamp.com/shapeup/1.3-chapter-04

For this, all you need is pen and paper. The process is low fidelity, cheap, and lets you quickly flesh out your ideas toward concrete screens at which point you can reach out for the component library.

To start you need to learn how the code works. But about the code you must first make a very deliberate decision:

* Do you want to learn this for yourself?

* Or, are you looking for employment?

If the goal is employment then if you have a Java background learn Angular, otherwise learn React. They are massive frameworks, so its really just a matter of using the world's largest tools to put text on screen. Watch videos online. Be prepared for a lot of boring instruction that feels like copy/paste.

If the goal is to learn this just for your own personal use then don't even bother with the framework nonsense. Its an inch deep just to people under-qualified people into the workforce and will become all consuming. Instead learn the event model for interaction, accessibility for how to write the markup, CSS how to make it pretty, and the DOM for how all this works together. Its more complicated than it sounds to get started, but once you achieve the smallest level of comfort its astonishingly faster to learn than the framework nonsense, because the framework nonsense is much larger than the things it layers over.