Ask HN: Good resources for programmers to learn about UX/design?

40 points Jun 18, 2022

Whenever I need to build a UI/interface for a side-project, I always feel frustrated that I cannot create anything that looks or feels good to use.

What are your favourite resources to learn about UX/design? Doesn't have to be web-related.

ljoshua Jun 18, 2022

Refactoring UI (https://www.refactoringui.com) is a fantastic resource, and we’ll worth the price in my opinion. I refer to it again and again. You can also find videos on YouTube of the author doing “live” UI redesigns/refactorings, and those are also very useful.

soulofmischief Jun 18, 2022

Is this book the reason I see such bad UX trends across the web?

In many of the visual examples, the recommended approach looks worse than the criticized approach, and in some cases is much less parsable. A phrase like "Use more whitespace" isn't some simple-yet-woke millennial web mantra, it's just crappy advice, too vague to be useful and vague enough to be harmful.

Truly, some of these examples are the antithesis to good design. The chapters of the book seem highly opinionated and forcing a particular set of (unvalidated) opinions upon me instead of generalized, objectively applicable tools.

ljoshua Jun 18, 2022

Agreed that it is quite opinionated, and shouldn't be taken for gospel. But I think it's a very good resource for those that are coming from no design background at all and need some strong principles to guide them at the beginning.

Many an engineer-designed page or screen would have benefited from some of the basic principles here, including "use more whitespace."

dhzhzjsbevs Jun 20, 2022

I love that the first example suggesting fewer borders looks worse and more confusing than the one they're suggesting not to use.

soulofmischief Jun 24, 2022

Yeah, that really stuck out to me as just awful design. Completely unparsable.

akprasad Jun 18, 2022

Do you have a resource you recommend instead?

SebastianKra Jun 19, 2022

+1 for Refactoring Design. The designs it presents are okay. But it highlights many of the considerations and techniques you can use to find your style.

Also, as a rule, don't listen to HN for design opinions. Many people here talk about design like a bad programmer talks about principles: "Always have 100% unit test coverage" or "Functions should never be longer than 7 lines".

My recent favorite was when an article introduced an unusual, award-winning checkbox design for a very specific use-case, and a number of comments completely missed the context [1].

^[1]: https://www.hackerneue.com/item?id=31783841

zo1 Jun 18, 2022

Is it just me, or does the first example in that link, the contact search + list form, look much better in the way that the book says is the "Wrong way"?

Adrig Jun 18, 2022

My go-to resource is the NN Group (https://www.nngroup.com/). One of the most serious publication that tries to back up insights with actual data.

Then there are the publications from people in the industry that can be interesting, but that's case by case. You'll have better results for specific problems like building and maintaining a design system.

You also have the UX collective (http://uxdesign.cc/) but their articles are hit or miss. Good ones at least provide references for you to explore deeper.

QuadmasterXLII Jun 18, 2022

I enjoyed Gwern's "Design of this website" https://www.gwern.net/Design

oumua_don17 Jun 18, 2022

These are expensive but fantastic more than worth the cost courses. [1] [2]

[1] https://learnui.design/

[2] https://learnui.design/courses/learn-ux-design.html

Leftium Jun 19, 2022

Making UX that feels good to use: https://www.udemy.com/course/ultimate-guide-to-ux/

Making UI that looks good (at least decent): https://getbootstrap.com/docs/5.2/examples/

dccoolgai Jun 19, 2022

First: UX is not visual design and visual design is not UX. Industry tends to blur them ("oh this person does Photoshop so we'll make them in charge of UX"). If you want to learn design, I'm less sure of what to recommend outside of "read a lot about Dieter Rams".

For UX, read Nielsen Norman and Dr. Weinschenks book "100 things every designer needs to know about humans".

lioeters Jun 18, 2022

Design Systems Repo - A frequently updated collection of Design System examples, articles, tools and talks

https://designsystemsrepo.com/

Awesome Design Systems

https://github.com/alexpate/awesome-design-systems

dhzhzjsbevs Jun 19, 2022

For usability, "don't make me think" is gospel.

https://www.amazon.com.au/Dont-Make-Think-Revisited-Usabilit...

For design itself I'm just not that way inclined and use existing frameworks instead.

kristiandupont Jun 18, 2022

Adam and Steve (of TailwindCSS fame) have some valuable resources. I have purchased both TailwindUI and Refactoring UI: https://www.refactoringui.com/, both of which I can highly recommend besides from their many free youtube videos.

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