Reddit reviews Designing Interfaces: Patterns for Effective Interaction Design

Interaction Design

• About Face 3 by Alan Cooper
  
• Designing Interactions by Bill Moggridge
  
• Designing Interfaces by Jenifer Tidwell
  
• Designing for the Digital Age by Kim Goodwin
  
• Making Things Talk: (2011) (2007) by Tom Igoe
  
  Interior Design
  
  
• The Decoration of Houses by Edith Wharton and Ogden, Jr. Codman
  
• Domino: The Book of Decorating by Deborah Needleman
  
• Design*Sponge at Home: A Guide to Inspiring Homes by Grace Bonney
  
• The Vintage/Modern Home by Katherine Sorrell
  
• The Fundamentals of Interior Design by Simon Dodsworth
  
  Landscape Architecture
  
  
• Landscape Architectural Graphic Standards by Leonard J. Hopper
  
• Landscape Design: A Cultural and Architectural History by Elizabeth Barlow Rogers
  
• Landscape Graphics by Grant W. Reid
  
• Cities for People by Jan Gehl
  
• Design with Nature by Ian L. McHarg
  
  Lighting Design
  
  
• Stage Lighting Design by Richard Pilbrow
  
• The Architecture of Natural Light by Henry Plummer
  
• Painting With Light by John Alton
  
• Made of Light by Anthony Tischhauser
  
• Color, Environment and Human Response by Frank H. Mahnke & Rudolf H. Mahnke
  
  Product Design
  
  
• Sketching: Drawing Techniques from Product Designers by Koos Eissen
  
• Design for the Real World by Victor Papanek
  
• The Craftsman by Richard Sennett
  
• Mythologies by Roland Barthes
  
• Cradle to Cradle. Remaking the Way We Make Things by William McDonough & Michael Braungart
  
  Product Design
  
  
• In the Bubble: Designing in a Complex World by John Thackara
  
• The Experience Economy by B. Joseph Pine II & James H. Gilmore
  
• Universal Methods of Design by Bruce Hanington & Bella Martin
  
• Cradle to Cradle. Remaking the Way We Make Things by William McDonough & Michael Braungart
  
• Mental Models by Indi Young
  
  Sound Design
  
  
• Sound Design: The Expressive Power of Music, Voice and Sound Effects in Cinema by David Sonnenschein
  
• Designing Sound by Andy Farnell
  
• Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen by Michel Chion
  
• The Sound Effects Bible by Ric Viers
  
• Sound Theory Sound Practice by Rick Altman
  
  Urban Design
  
  
• The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs
  * Cities for People by Jan Gehl
  
• A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander
  
• The Geography of Nowhere by James Howard Kunstler
  
• The Image of the City by Kevin Lynch
  
  Web Design
  
  
• Don't Make Me Think by Steve Krug
  
• HTML & CSS: Design and Build Web Sites by Jon Duckett
  
• The Principles of Beautiful Web Design by Jason Beaird
  
• Responsive Web Design with HTML5 and CSS by Ben Frain
  
• Hardboiled Web Design by Andy Clarke
  

If you're looking for books (not that you said you were) I definitely recommend O'Reilly's Designing Interfaces, by Jennifer Tidwell. It does a good job of breaking down both what elements are available, but also what problems they're trying to solve - which is especially valuable when discussing design with others.

Designing Interfaces by Jennifer Tidwell is a fantastic book full of full color illustrated examples of both good and bad ways to design your interfaces. On top of that, she does a great job of discussing the pros and cons of each widget type, layouts, visual ordering, etc. Definitely worth the read.

One of my favorites is Designing Interfaces. It focuses on user patterns, not all are necessarily for the web, but it provides a good basis of user interaction theory/reasoning. It's also great when you're stuck for ideas on how to approach an interaction problem. This is super-useful for designing web apps, but is still useful for straight-up web stuff.

(I also noticed that there's a Designing Web Interfaces book, which I haven't read, but could be interesting.)

Don't Make Me Think

The Design Of Everyday Things

Designing Interfaces

I have been learning UI/UX all summer.

• To get your mind chugging in the right direction and to get an idea of the purpose of UI/UX The Inmates Are Running the Asylum
  
  
  
• Good Design Patterns for Interface Design, alot of case studies good to have in as a ref Designing Interfaces
  
  
• Good place to start learning Interaction Design Elts of UX
  
  
• Good to read after you have a better idea of UX Jon Kolko

Hey there! Sorry for the delay. Lots has been going on. Axure is more than enough, but it comes with a cost. You can get a free trial and take it for a spin to see what all the hype is about.

So, four things you need to know:

• Know UI patterns, and know when to use them. IMO, this is the best book because it will show you the pattern, and then shows examples of how the pattern has been used. Very easy to learn these as you can always google or look them up on the fly.
  
  
• Know how to ask users the right questions. You want untainted data. Using questions to uncover insights is 80% of the battle. This book has a lovely section on the art of asking non-leading questions. I re-read it every few months. It even tells you the questions to never ask, like "If you could change anything about our app/interface, what would you change?" and why you never ask something like that. This is more of a medium difficulty to learn.
  
  
• Know all the basic, baseline usability laws & guidelines. This will get your foundation going. Read NNG's posts, they are very insightful. These are the easy to learn.
  
  
• Lastly, get acquainted with facilitation. If you can proctor a research session, guide a meeting, ask the right questions, etc., you can be a UXer. UXers are vital in being the glue that ties engineers, business, and aesthetics together in a way that is meaningful to users. Soft skills are hardest to learn and it will take you a long time, but you will get there if you practice as much as you can. If you don't practice, you will never get there as you can't learn it from a book or look it up on the fly.
  
  Now, your portfolio should have as many full projects as possible. From the very beginning, all the way through the end, and list the outcomes of the project. You need to outline the specific roles you played, how your skills impacted the project, show what your deliverables were, talk about challenges, etc. Hands down that is the most powerful format of showing your work. It requires more effort than just lazily posting pretty images, but it will get you cold callbacks 90% of the time. The other 10% is just who you know.
  
  Hope that is helpful! Always happy to answer questions.