15 ms·

(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 understa

(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 prototyping, where you have your team just draw it out on paper and simulate the UI. It's simple, fast, and cheap, and from a cognitive perspective, you can explore more of the design space (think breadth-first search instead of depth-first), and you don't get overly attached to your designs. In my course on UX design, we also use Balsamiq and InVision, though other tools seem fine (e.g. Marvel, Figma, etc). One of our alums created this great chart comparing different prototyping tools: https://www.cooper.com/prototyping-tools https://www.cooper.com/prototyping-tools 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. And lastly, here's a slide deck I put together and used at my startup several years ago. It was intended as a short 1-hour crash course. https://www.slideshare.net/jas0nh0ng/01-1hourcrashcourseuxhci https://www.slideshare.net/jas0nh0ng/01-1hourcrashcourseuxhc...

amelius 8y ago
Are any of those prototyping tools open source and free?
- troymc 8y ago
  "the best is paper prototyping"
  - checkyoursudo 8y ago
    This was true when I was doing it in grad school in 2000ish as well. I would not be surprised if it was true long before that and will remain so long after today.
  - arvinsim 8y ago
    I used to think that prototyping on a paper is expensive since paper is non-reusable. Then I proceeded to prototype on an expensive tablet. Funny looking back at it now.
- alistairSH 8y ago
  Design of Everyday Things & Don't Make Me Think are both likely to be in your employer's library, or on a co-worker's shelf. Not quite free, but I bet you can find a hard-copy to borrow.
  - DDR0 8y ago
    Or in your local public library, which is quite free. :)
- dmcy22 8y ago
  Adobe XD is a free tool for prototyping, though not Open Source.
  - barbecue_sauce 8y ago
    Is it useful without the rest of their creative suite? I only ask because Premiere, After Effects, and Photoshop are most effective when used together and obviously designed for that kind of synergy.
    - cercatrova 8y ago
      Yes it is useful without the rest of the suite. I would also recommend Figma which is also free.
- cercatrova 8y ago
  Figma is free, not open source however.
- rchaud 8y ago
  I suppose you could use GIMP to prototype, but it would be a massive pain. I use Figma (free; web-based; not open source) for personal projects; if you've used PowerPoint, you can use Figma; the learning curve was very shallow. Most prototyping tools let you export to PDF on PNG, but they usually aren't going to be open source.
- darkwinx 8y ago
  I only know Pencil
johnl1479 8y ago
> 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 make a good UI or UX.
- sizzle 8y ago
  Too bad a lot of jobs now will hire the 10 week General Assembly UX grad with flashy dribblesque portfolio, that can produce visual and graphic design assets that heavily copy UX patterns from other apps or just follow material design/ apple human interface guidelines verbatim and let the UX researchers figure out usability and design recommendations based off user testing. How has HCI given you an advantage over a UX bootcamp grad that can speak the lingo and mastered Photoshop/sketch?
  - johnl1479 8y ago
    I would consider copying patterns and Material or Apple HIGs to be the 'how' [to build a good UI or UX] I mentioned previously: those are artifacts produced by others who I would consider have good understanding and experience in 'what' makes a good UI or UX. I think my advantage is being more aligned with the 'what'. A UX bootcamper could come in and whip something up quickly that looks pretty and win over the hearts and minds of the project sponsors, but (I assume) said bootcamp isn't teaching different theories of cognition or offering practical experience in designing studies in which to test some new interaction.
wwweston 8y ago
If paper is the best, how would you characterize the place of tools like Balsamiq / Axure etc? Might they be symptoms of app/tech addiction, or do they facilitate anything specific?
- ghaff 8y ago
  Also see his revised edition to DOET and Emotional Design. It’s part of a broader evolution from UI to UX and experiential issues more broadly.
- 1wu 8y ago
  It's hard to simulate non-trivial interactivity with paper. In real life, teams are not always co-located, and software tools facilitate collaboration in different ways. If anything, the public(consumer)'s appetite for graphic/visual/UX design has gotten a lot stronger in the decade since research was done on paper prototyping. High-quality animations and subtle interaction techniques, explosion in form factors and devices / mobile operating system [versions], and the rise of non-technical app builders may have also encouraged the development of such tools.
mortenjorck 8y ago
I don’t teach UX design, but if I did, Norman’s The Design of Everyday Things would be the first assigned reading. I’ve even recommended it to friends who aren’t looking to transition into design, but just want a better understanding of the discipline for the occasional departmental web page, etc. If you want to focus on visual language, iconography, and how graphics communicate, an unconventional, yet highly-regarded choice is Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics. What Norman does for interaction, McCloud does for visual communication (and does so, appropriately, in the form of a comic book).
- OJFord 8y ago
  I took a course on HCI (at Imperial, Professor Robert Spence) and it _was_ the first 'assigned' reading, definitely recommend - and it's actually a pretty good stocking/'secret santa' present this time of year for anyone even idly curious about things and how they work. I'd also highly recommend Spence's own book: Information Visualisation. I don't work in HCI/UX at all, but I enjoyed it a lot; it does an excellent job of showing that it's much more than 'just' (sorry!) artsy design.
plainOldText 8y ago
Don Norman's book The Design of Everyday Things has indeed altered how I look at the world from a design perspective. It teaches you design awareness, and you'll find yourself noticing and understanding design elements all around you, that you didn't before. Even though it might seem a little old, the information presented in there is timeless, so I highly recommend it as well. It is in fact the first book I would suggest to anyone wanting to learn how to think like a designer. I recently got his other book, Emotional Design, I just haven't gotten to it yet.
- PascLeRasc 8y ago
  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).
  - plainOldText 8y ago
    Indeed! I scrutinize door designs everywhere I go now. (:
  - moltar 8y ago
    And tea pots that leak! It was supposed to do one thing ...
    - ternaryoperator 8y ago
      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.
      - moltar 8y ago
        Can’t wait till we can mass produce open sourced objects. E.g. 3D print on demand a kettle
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
bch 8y ago
I’ve read (and love) his book and enjoy thinking about function and design. I think there’s a risk of designing at the expense of joy and beauty though, and Don Norman seems to have qualified his position post-The Design of Everyday Things in a TED Talk[0]. I think it’s worthwhile watching. [0] https://www.ted.com/talks/don_norman_on_design_and_emotion/up-next https://www.ted.com/talks/don_norman_on_design_and_emotion/u...
Finnucane 8y ago
Oy, guy advising on UI/UX ends discussion by pointing to 99-slide-long powerpoint deck that appears to be lots of bullet lists and clip art. Well, [expletive deleted].
- fermienrico 8y ago
  I think the slides are providing conceptual framework about UX/UI and not aesthetic. I do think that it is pretty useless without the author speaking to it.
  - Finnucane 8y ago
    Sure, I just think it’s funny that he chooses one of the worst user experiences ever invented to do it.
lugg 8y ago
I personally question anyone 1-2 degrees away from software that hasn't read "Don't make me think." Its a short and easy 2 hour read but the level of paradigm change you receive if you're being exposed to hci for the first time is immense. I even found its thinking useful from the developer side of things, as in, writing software libraries that were obvious and easy to use.
azhenley 8y ago
Design of Everyday Things is great. I even had my Software Engineering students read excepts this semester.
sizzle 8y ago
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 (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?
- uxcolumbo 8y ago
  Titles in our industry are such a mess. I really can't stand 'UI/UX Designer'. If I see that title then usually that's a signal for me that the hiring manager doesn't really know what they need. To me product designer means someone who's a hybrid, an alrounder - basically a UX designer with following traits: - good research and analytical skills - decent or great visual design skills - ability to create sophisticated prototypes (not just creating hot-mapped images) - someone who has good technical knowledge, so they don't design something that's going to be really difficult and expensive to build - someone who considers product and business matters, i.e. ability to strike the balance between user and business needs. What are you hoping a PhD will give you? I'm not sure where you are, but if you want to use your skills for something good, why not try to help your government - improving their online services etc. See for example what the UK did to their government sites - a great investment that made it easier for millions of people to understand and use their online services. One example: https://beta.nhs.uk/service-manual/design-principles/ https://beta.nhs.uk/service-manual/design-principles/ edit: formatting issues
gcb0 8y ago
don's book is good and all, but it is a equivalent to a TED talk. I would never recommend it to anyone looking for anything other than entertaining highly-specific annecdotes.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
kyaghmour 8y ago
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 '90s edition. The newly added chapters in the newer edition are more level-headed in that regard. Seeing how strongly this book was recommended in certain quarters left me uncomfortable and seemed to somewhat explain the general mentality pervading certain narratives that somehow it's best not to have engineers be involved in UX design but rather leave that to "professional" UX designers. If you haven't guessed already, my background is engineering. So you read from that what you want, but I've crossed paths with a very large number of engineers who dismissed or diminished their own ability to form judgement on UX because of a general sense that the "consensus" was that engineers aren't good at that, and have seen several cases where the decision model in organizations was specifically tailored to tune out engineers from UX decisions. Both of these things are wrong from my pov. I certainly don't want to diminish the value of having UX as a specialization. However, I cannot recommend a title whose narrative champions one set of professionals at the expense of others.
- _hardwaregeek 8y ago
  That's a very interesting view, as Norman had an engineering background himself. I didn't notice that tone myself, but that doesn't mean you're wrong.
- rpedela 8y ago
  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 engineers don't do that which makes it tough for them to provide useful feedback, insights, etc. So I understand why some people don't want engineers involved. Just last week, I had the very first design meeting for a new project and a veteran engineer was invited. He didn't even let the presenter finish before talking about how the backend should be built and how much time it would take. That wasn't helpful. I think engineers who are good at design are immensely valuable, but most engineers suck at it.
codyb 8y ago
I can attest to those two books being fantastic resources on UI/UX design. They're the only two books I've read on the matter and I'm consistently praised as one of the more user experience focused engineers in any team I work on. Although, I can't walk through half the doors in the world it seems without going "why the hell does this pull door have a push handle!!", so there is that side effect.
babahoyo 8y ago
Weird question, but why is there so much bad UI out there? Do you feel like you've failed as a field when commonly used applications like Gmail and adobe reader have such bad user experiences?
- 1wu 8y ago
  I think Gmail has great UI, but I recognize that assessment is partially a matter of taste and partially a function of how I think. Better UI/UX doesn't always lead to better business outcomes.. Sad, but true. It's (arguably) a young[er] field, relative to software or hardware engineering. Maybe things will get better :)
  - babahoyo 8y ago
    Yeah i guess the UI isnt that bad. Performance > UI in many cases for me though. Hopefully responsiveness times are something people consider more in designing an interface.
- jasonhong 8y ago
  I'd say it's a combination of several factors, including: - The designers / developers thinking that they are typical users, and that they know how things work ("You are not the user" is the phrase we repeat a lot here at CMU) - A lack of education about how to design things (e.g., basics of perception, design patterns, basic interaction principles, conventions) - Time and money - A common mentality that "we can fix the UI at the end" - Legal requirements, marketing, corporate partnerships, etc, that is all of the cruft that doesn't focus on user experience - For popular products, a very large user base, which means legacy support (people don't like change), and different people using different features (I once heard that people only use ~20% of features in MSWord, but it's a different 20% for different people)
wpmoradi 8y ago
Great resource!
1wu 8y ago
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.
- jasonhong 8y ago
  (Yeah, slow response on my side, end of semester here) Yes, you're right that it does suggest a certain kind of corporate culture and mindset. A common big challenge with UX is educating the rest of your company about best practices, and most importantly, demonstrating results. Convincing (say) skeptical engineers of the value of user studies can be hard. A common technique is showing videos of user studies and people failing to use the product. Another common technique is to bring an engineer to a site visit and get first hand experience of the pain points.

amelius 8y ago

Are any of those prototyping tools open source and free?

troymc 8y ago
"the best is paper prototyping"
- checkyoursudo 8y ago
  This was true when I was doing it in grad school in 2000ish as well. I would not be surprised if it was true long before that and will remain so long after today.
- arvinsim 8y ago
  I used to think that prototyping on a paper is expensive since paper is non-reusable. Then I proceeded to prototype on an expensive tablet. Funny looking back at it now.
alistairSH 8y ago
Design of Everyday Things & Don't Make Me Think are both likely to be in your employer's library, or on a co-worker's shelf. Not quite free, but I bet you can find a hard-copy to borrow.
- DDR0 8y ago
  Or in your local public library, which is quite free. :)
dmcy22 8y ago
Adobe XD is a free tool for prototyping, though not Open Source.
- barbecue_sauce 8y ago
  Is it useful without the rest of their creative suite? I only ask because Premiere, After Effects, and Photoshop are most effective when used together and obviously designed for that kind of synergy.
  - cercatrova 8y ago
    Yes it is useful without the rest of the suite. I would also recommend Figma which is also free.
cercatrova 8y ago
Figma is free, not open source however.
rchaud 8y ago
I suppose you could use GIMP to prototype, but it would be a massive pain. I use Figma (free; web-based; not open source) for personal projects; if you've used PowerPoint, you can use Figma; the learning curve was very shallow. Most prototyping tools let you export to PDF on PNG, but they usually aren't going to be open source.
darkwinx 8y ago
I only know Pencil

johnl1479 8y ago

> 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 make a good UI or UX.

sizzle 8y ago
Too bad a lot of jobs now will hire the 10 week General Assembly UX grad with flashy dribblesque portfolio, that can produce visual and graphic design assets that heavily copy UX patterns from other apps or just follow material design/ apple human interface guidelines verbatim and let the UX researchers figure out usability and design recommendations based off user testing. How has HCI given you an advantage over a UX bootcamp grad that can speak the lingo and mastered Photoshop/sketch?
- johnl1479 8y ago
  I would consider copying patterns and Material or Apple HIGs to be the 'how' [to build a good UI or UX] I mentioned previously: those are artifacts produced by others who I would consider have good understanding and experience in 'what' makes a good UI or UX. I think my advantage is being more aligned with the 'what'. A UX bootcamper could come in and whip something up quickly that looks pretty and win over the hearts and minds of the project sponsors, but (I assume) said bootcamp isn't teaching different theories of cognition or offering practical experience in designing studies in which to test some new interaction.

wwweston 8y ago

If paper is the best, how would you characterize the place of tools like Balsamiq / Axure etc? Might they be symptoms of app/tech addiction, or do they facilitate anything specific?

ghaff 8y ago
Also see his revised edition to DOET and Emotional Design. It’s part of a broader evolution from UI to UX and experiential issues more broadly.
1wu 8y ago
It's hard to simulate non-trivial interactivity with paper. In real life, teams are not always co-located, and software tools facilitate collaboration in different ways. If anything, the public(consumer)'s appetite for graphic/visual/UX design has gotten a lot stronger in the decade since research was done on paper prototyping. High-quality animations and subtle interaction techniques, explosion in form factors and devices / mobile operating system [versions], and the rise of non-technical app builders may have also encouraged the development of such tools.

mortenjorck 8y ago

I don’t teach UX design, but if I did, Norman’s The Design of Everyday Things would be the first assigned reading. I’ve even recommended it to friends who aren’t looking to transition into design, but just want a better understanding of the discipline for the occasional departmental web page, etc. If you want to focus on visual language, iconography, and how graphics communicate, an unconventional, yet highly-regarded choice is Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics. What Norman does for interaction, McCloud does for visual communication (and does so, appropriately, in the form of a comic book).

OJFord 8y ago
I took a course on HCI (at Imperial, Professor Robert Spence) and it _was_ the first 'assigned' reading, definitely recommend - and it's actually a pretty good stocking/'secret santa' present this time of year for anyone even idly curious about things and how they work. I'd also highly recommend Spence's own book: Information Visualisation. I don't work in HCI/UX at all, but I enjoyed it a lot; it does an excellent job of showing that it's much more than 'just' (sorry!) artsy design.

plainOldText 8y ago

Don Norman's book The Design of Everyday Things has indeed altered how I look at the world from a design perspective. It teaches you design awareness, and you'll find yourself noticing and understanding design elements all around you, that you didn't before. Even though it might seem a little old, the information presented in there is timeless, so I highly recommend it as well. It is in fact the first book I would suggest to anyone wanting to learn how to think like a designer. I recently got his other book, Emotional Design, I just haven't gotten to it yet.

PascLeRasc 8y ago
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).
- plainOldText 8y ago
  Indeed! I scrutinize door designs everywhere I go now. (:
- moltar 8y ago
  And tea pots that leak! It was supposed to do one thing ...
  - ternaryoperator 8y ago
    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.
    - moltar 8y ago
      Can’t wait till we can mass produce open sourced objects. E.g. 3D print on demand a kettle

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

bch 8y ago

I’ve read (and love) his book and enjoy thinking about function and design. I think there’s a risk of designing at the expense of joy and beauty though, and Don Norman seems to have qualified his position post-The Design of Everyday Things in a TED Talk[0]. I think it’s worthwhile watching. [0] https://www.ted.com/talks/don_norman_on_design_and_emotion/up-next https://www.ted.com/talks/don_norman_on_design_and_emotion/u...

Finnucane 8y ago

Oy, guy advising on UI/UX ends discussion by pointing to 99-slide-long powerpoint deck that appears to be lots of bullet lists and clip art. Well, [expletive deleted].

fermienrico 8y ago
I think the slides are providing conceptual framework about UX/UI and not aesthetic. I do think that it is pretty useless without the author speaking to it.
- Finnucane 8y ago
  Sure, I just think it’s funny that he chooses one of the worst user experiences ever invented to do it.

lugg 8y ago

I personally question anyone 1-2 degrees away from software that hasn't read "Don't make me think." Its a short and easy 2 hour read but the level of paradigm change you receive if you're being exposed to hci for the first time is immense. I even found its thinking useful from the developer side of things, as in, writing software libraries that were obvious and easy to use.

azhenley 8y ago

Design of Everyday Things is great. I even had my Software Engineering students read excepts this semester.

sizzle 8y ago

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 (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?

uxcolumbo 8y ago
Titles in our industry are such a mess. I really can't stand 'UI/UX Designer'. If I see that title then usually that's a signal for me that the hiring manager doesn't really know what they need. To me product designer means someone who's a hybrid, an alrounder - basically a UX designer with following traits: - good research and analytical skills - decent or great visual design skills - ability to create sophisticated prototypes (not just creating hot-mapped images) - someone who has good technical knowledge, so they don't design something that's going to be really difficult and expensive to build - someone who considers product and business matters, i.e. ability to strike the balance between user and business needs. What are you hoping a PhD will give you? I'm not sure where you are, but if you want to use your skills for something good, why not try to help your government - improving their online services etc. See for example what the UK did to their government sites - a great investment that made it easier for millions of people to understand and use their online services. One example: https://beta.nhs.uk/service-manual/design-principles/ https://beta.nhs.uk/service-manual/design-principles/ edit: formatting issues

gcb0 8y ago

don's book is good and all, but it is a equivalent to a TED talk. I would never recommend it to anyone looking for anything other than entertaining highly-specific annecdotes.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

kyaghmour 8y ago

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 '90s edition. The newly added chapters in the newer edition are more level-headed in that regard. Seeing how strongly this book was recommended in certain quarters left me uncomfortable and seemed to somewhat explain the general mentality pervading certain narratives that somehow it's best not to have engineers be involved in UX design but rather leave that to "professional" UX designers. If you haven't guessed already, my background is engineering. So you read from that what you want, but I've crossed paths with a very large number of engineers who dismissed or diminished their own ability to form judgement on UX because of a general sense that the "consensus" was that engineers aren't good at that, and have seen several cases where the decision model in organizations was specifically tailored to tune out engineers from UX decisions. Both of these things are wrong from my pov. I certainly don't want to diminish the value of having UX as a specialization. However, I cannot recommend a title whose narrative champions one set of professionals at the expense of others.

_hardwaregeek 8y ago
That's a very interesting view, as Norman had an engineering background himself. I didn't notice that tone myself, but that doesn't mean you're wrong.
rpedela 8y ago
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 engineers don't do that which makes it tough for them to provide useful feedback, insights, etc. So I understand why some people don't want engineers involved. Just last week, I had the very first design meeting for a new project and a veteran engineer was invited. He didn't even let the presenter finish before talking about how the backend should be built and how much time it would take. That wasn't helpful. I think engineers who are good at design are immensely valuable, but most engineers suck at it.

codyb 8y ago

I can attest to those two books being fantastic resources on UI/UX design. They're the only two books I've read on the matter and I'm consistently praised as one of the more user experience focused engineers in any team I work on. Although, I can't walk through half the doors in the world it seems without going "why the hell does this pull door have a push handle!!", so there is that side effect.

babahoyo 8y ago

Weird question, but why is there so much bad UI out there? Do you feel like you've failed as a field when commonly used applications like Gmail and adobe reader have such bad user experiences?

1wu 8y ago
I think Gmail has great UI, but I recognize that assessment is partially a matter of taste and partially a function of how I think. Better UI/UX doesn't always lead to better business outcomes.. Sad, but true. It's (arguably) a young[er] field, relative to software or hardware engineering. Maybe things will get better :)
- babahoyo 8y ago
  Yeah i guess the UI isnt that bad. Performance > UI in many cases for me though. Hopefully responsiveness times are something people consider more in designing an interface.
jasonhong 8y ago
I'd say it's a combination of several factors, including: - The designers / developers thinking that they are typical users, and that they know how things work ("You are not the user" is the phrase we repeat a lot here at CMU) - A lack of education about how to design things (e.g., basics of perception, design patterns, basic interaction principles, conventions) - Time and money - A common mentality that "we can fix the UI at the end" - Legal requirements, marketing, corporate partnerships, etc, that is all of the cruft that doesn't focus on user experience - For popular products, a very large user base, which means legacy support (people don't like change), and different people using different features (I once heard that people only use ~20% of features in MSWord, but it's a different 20% for different people)

wpmoradi 8y ago

Great resource!

1wu 8y ago

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.

jasonhong 8y ago
(Yeah, slow response on my side, end of semester here) Yes, you're right that it does suggest a certain kind of corporate culture and mindset. A common big challenge with UX is educating the rest of your company about best practices, and most importantly, demonstrating results. Convincing (say) skeptical engineers of the value of user studies can be hard. A common technique is showing videos of user studies and people failing to use the product. Another common technique is to bring an engineer to a site visit and get first hand experience of the pain points.