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User Experience Design Learning Path

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Re: User Experience Design Learning Path

#21

Post by parul »

darushimo wrote: post #18
gautambay wrote: post #4

The goal of this Learning Path is to list helpful resources into a curriculum that a motivated beginner can follow to learn the essentials of UX Design. Designers of Hacker News, we'd love your help on 2 things: 1. We'd love your feedback on the curriculum itself. e.g. Do the topics and flow look right? Are the projects sufficient? 2. If you're a UX designer who loves to teach and mentor new professionals, I'd love t…

I'm a little confused--is the first video in the 3rd section ("intro to the design of everyday things") really an entire course? If so, i think the time-to-complete estimate (1 hr) should be changed...If it's not, it'd be great if the particular videos to be watched were noted.

Seems like "Design of Everyday Things" is a really short course, with only 3 Chapters and each video of 1-2 minutes. The total video lecture time for the entire course could well be ~1 hour. The project (timebank) is what will take more time and the estimate for that in Section 3.3 is 8 hours.

Re: User Experience Design Learning Path

#22

Post by jdebari »

lelifer wrote: post #17
jbjorge wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...after you've learned the principles of UX.

UX is not something you learn its something you gain w/ experience with all theses technologies. its messing up and starting over again and implementing a better design than the previous gaining even more experience/methodologies. or at least that's the pro way of learning UX.

I partially agree. UX is something that comes with practice, but it isn't about technology. It's about a process for solving problems for people. The technology itself shouldn't matter, but it is good to know how things work in order to understand and communicate with your team.

Re: User Experience Design Learning Path

#24

Post by dotnetkow »

dceddia wrote: post #6

This looks like a great resource, thanks for putting this together. As a developer who's interested in web design/UX design (but not all that great at it), this will be helpful. If you don't mind, I'll mention it on my blog as well. I've started writing about my process in trying to improve my design skills ( http://designwithdave.com ), and I think my (few, but growing) readers would find it useful.

Great idea for a blog! Will start following it.

Re: User Experience Design Learning Path

#25

Post by seanmcdirmid »

paulojreis wrote: post #11
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HCI itself has little bearing on design even if the HCI community wished otherwise. Fitts' law came from the experimental psychology field...given that HCI didn't even exist in the 50s and 60s. Most of its lessons are codified into easy digest principles. Don't forget Hick's law, which is also useful when designing menus (also experimental psychology).

I can't agree with you. HCI has a lot of impact on design, in spite of not being acknowledged (or even known ) by most of the practitioners. What the aspiring UX designers are reading (in Smashing Magazine & others) is, mostly, rephrasings of HCI knowledge. Most UX methods and guidelines come from HCI (and HCI, of course, comes from other disciplines).

I'm betting you are on the HCI side and not the design side right? I'm a researcher, I know lots of HCI researchers, I know lots of designers, and the overlap in what the two do is so is slight. Most work on HCI is at the test, measure level, very much a science, while design is a different method from science in its own right.

Is knowing some HCI useful for design? Sure, but necessary? The best designers I've worked with have none, while going from HCI to design requires a drastic shift in mindset. Keep in mind that HCI first and foremost is a computer science discipline practiced exclusively by computer scientists. Design is mostly practiced by those trained as designers, in design school by people who have never been remotely near HCI. They are definitely analytic, but are not data driven (well, google, and in the web world where engineers have taken over, but that's a new trend and not necessarily a lasting one), their method is design thinking rather than the scientific method.

Re: User Experience Design Learning Path

#26

Post by themoonbus »

lelifer wrote: post #17
jbjorge wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...after you've learned the principles of UX.

UX is not something you learn its something you gain w/ experience with all theses technologies. its messing up and starting over again and implementing a better design than the previous gaining even more experience/methodologies. or at least that's the pro way of learning UX.

Not all UX professionals are coders or start as coders. Some just understand UX principles / methodologies and how to apply them to solve design problems.

Also, UX isn't exclusive to software.

Re: User Experience Design Learning Path

#27

Post by seanmcdirmid »

lelifer wrote: post #13

if u want to be a pro UI/UX designer, learn javascript (Kintetic, GSAP, backbone, famous, node and everything else that comes with node).

Yes, because we all know what is important is code and learning design doesn't already take 6 years of school and practice learning and doing other things coders would never think of .

If you want to code, then learn coding. But if you want to do design, you are going down a very different path and might not have the luxury of ever coding again (even if you know how).

Re: User Experience Design Learning Path

#28

Post by protonfish »

This seems like a decent site - I still need to go through all of the resources more thoroughly but I have two comments.

I am not a fan of using video primarily over text. This is also why I am not a fan of Khan Academy, so maybe it's just my preference and doesn't reflect what most of your users want but I do have facts and reasoning to back up my opinion. Anything that requires sound is going to limit it's use to a private setting, and videos can't be skimmed or used as a reference. I understand their occasional value for supplemental lessons, but I don't they should be required to use tutorials.

There may be a demand for UX designers but as much as I would love to focus my career in that area, I won't because UX is a bike shed. Even if you designed the perfect UI, you would never get it past clueless management without having it mangled. The fight to do your job makes of 90% of your effort, and you will always lose.

Re: User Experience Design Learning Path

#29

Post by jnem »

jdebari wrote: post #22
lelifer wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

UX is not something you learn its something you gain w/ experience with all theses technologies. its messing up and starting over again and implementing a better design than the previous gaining even more experience/methodologies. or at least that's the pro way of learning UX.

I partially agree. UX is something that comes with practice, but it isn't about technology. It's about a process for solving problems for people. The technology itself shouldn't matter, but it is good to know how things work in order to understand and communicate with your team.

UX is DX (developer experience).

Re: User Experience Design Learning Path

#30

Post by paulojreis »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #25
paulojreis wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't agree with you. HCI has a lot of impact on design, in spite of not being acknowledged (or even known ) by most of the practitioners. What the aspiring UX designers are reading (in Smashing Magazine & others) is, mostly, rephrasings of HCI knowledge. Most UX methods and guidelines come from HCI (and HCI, of course, comes from other disciplines).

I'm betting you are on the HCI side and not the design side right? I'm a researcher, I know lots of HCI researchers, I know lots of designers, and the overlap in what the two do is so is slight. Most work on HCI is at the test, measure level, very much a science, while design is a different method from science in its own right. Is knowing some HCI useful for design? Sure, but necessary? The best designers I've worked…

> Most work on HCI is at the test, measure level, very much a science

Most work on HCI was at the measure level. If you follow HCI research, you may notice a trend: lots of publications based on ethnographic methods, qualitative approaches and the like. HCI (as in "HCI academic research") is, nowadays, much closer (methodologically) to design thinking than to experimental psychology.

> I'm betting you are on the HCI side and not the design side right?

I do both. I work in the industry (UI design, front-end dev, evaluation) and I'm a PhD student.

> Keep in mind that HCI first and foremost is a computer science discipline

I've the opposite opinion on this. From all the disciplines that "inform" HCI, CS would be the least important. But ...

> practiced exclusively by computer scientists.

I guess you're right on this, at least in the academia. I do have the impression that most HCI researchers have a CS background. But, at least in my country, this is mostly because CS departments have much more funding to hire researchers than the others.

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