Best human-computer interaction books according to redditors

We found 346 Reddit comments discussing the best human-computer interaction books. We ranked the 99 resulting products by number of redditors who mentioned them. Here are the top 20.

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Top Reddit comments about Human-Computer Interaction:

u/Dab_on_the_Devil · 156 pointsr/2meirl4meirl

It's 'cause the internet has shifted the capacity of our brains away from deep focus and towards shallow multitasking. It's why we do shit like close Reddit on our computers then pull out our phones and open Reddit again without thinking about it. If you're really curious to learn more about it, try to stay focused long enough and read The Shallows; If you're really interested in pushing back then look into meditation.

u/anagrambros · 83 pointsr/IAmA
u/Rexutu · 27 pointsr/gamedesign

I recommend Tynan Sylvester's book "Designing Games" (you can get a 7-day free trial of the e-book on Amazon). A lot of people will recommend A Book of Lenses by Jesse Schell but I personally felt it lacked substance. For the more philosophical aspects of the craft, here are some talks that I think are valuable 1 2 3
4 5 (hopefully ordered in a somewhat logical progression).

Another thing -- find out what kind of games you want to make, find out who makes that kind of game (a few examples: Jonathan Blow for puzzle games, Raph Koster and Project Horseshoe for MMOs, Tom Francis for whatever the fuck he makes, etc. -- and "kind" does not necessarily mean genres), and study what those people have to say, figuring out what you agree with and disagree with. Standing on others' shoulders is the easiest way to get good and the best path toward making games of true quality.

u/biochromatic · 22 pointsr/Futurology

> instant access to knowledge and infinite diversions ought to change brain connections

I just want to give a shoutout the The Shallows. It's a book that goes into detail on how new technology changes the way people think (including changing the connections in brains as you mentioned).

> Change mustn't mean in a bad way though.

This is a frequent topic in the book as well. There are things that people lose when they adopt new technologies, and there are things that people gain. Basically all technological advances have caused humanity to both lose something and gain something. For example, our ancestors may have been better at remembering things or had a better sense of direction compared to us. We would be better at assimilating many facts in a short period of time compared to our ancestors though.

u/one_is_the_loneliest · 21 pointsr/dwarffortress

Yup, passive reconnaissance is quite different from those other programming books ;)

u/MerlinTheFail · 20 pointsr/gamedev

In terms of design, A book of lenses is definitely a fantastic pick. I also read through: Engineering experiences, this helped me a lot design-wise. Also, of course, Game programming patterns is a must read for any programmer.

u/tracekill · 15 pointsr/books

Nicholas Carr's book The Shallows talks about this at length. It's backed up by some pretty solid science and does an excellent job tracing the history of the written word, and its relationship with our physiology and consciousness, up to the modern age. The book is biased by the "Baby Boomers are inherently less vapid than Millennials" mentality but it's definitely worth a read.

u/ClintonHammond · 14 pointsr/samharris
u/lennyjump · 14 pointsr/gamedev

Designing Visual Worlds by Bartle

Theory of Fun for Game Design by Koster is a classic and still largely valid

u/admorobo · 12 pointsr/getdisciplined

For anyone interested in the book, it's actually called The Shallows: What The Internet is Doing to our Brains. I read it last year and it made me realize how much of my media consumption is essentially wasted on things like Facebook and yes, even Reddit. I resolved to read more and use the internet less, which has definitely resulted in some good habits forming and some bad ones being broken. I started a reading challenge on Goodreads in January with a goal of reading 30 books this year, and I'm already nearly halfway there in Mid-March.

I personally need to read from paper books. Kindle screens, even the paperink ones, still distract my brain. I need to feel the weight of the book, the flip of the page. Reading for me is both a tactile and intellectual experience.

u/IQBoosterShot · 12 pointsr/books

Ironically, your solution may lay within the pages of The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr. The author describes how his undying love for books seemed to fade, how picking up and getting into a book seemed much more difficult than before and how distracted he felt he'd become.

This book resonated with me. I am a book lover yet I found myself losing my desire to spend time with a book. I would pick one up and I'd feel my mind start to wander or I'd feel fidgety before the end of a page.

There is a solution. I restructured my approach to the use of the internet and I'm glad to say that I'm reading like a champ again. All the joy and fun is back.

u/hitmantaaz · 12 pointsr/NoFap

Looked on Amazon, found it.

>March 7, 2017

I think you read the year a little to quickly, welcome in the future bro 😂

u/incongruity · 10 pointsr/Design

But it's wrong. And so is his "evidence". And that's why it's dangerous that new designers are reading this crap. It's rules of thumb written by someone missing a digit or two...

What do I mean? Here, this is blatantly copied from a reply I posted in another discussion about this piece:

As someone with professional experience in photography and a masters in design – I think this piece is seriously lacking.

First – the photo that is used as "evidence" caught my eye quickly because it is clearly poorly processed/improperly exposed. There is no black point and that's a bad thing for the image; which leads me to say – you can't make the sweeping generalization that black is always bad. It's not – and the work of one pop art painter and a bad bit of photography isn't substantiated proof.

If you want to actually make something meaningful out of this, you'd actually push hard on the idea that too much contrast is a bad thing. Black isn't bad. Heavy contrast can be. Instead, get down to the root reasons that we have issues with contrast – in short, we're wired to notice differences in color or brightness than we are for absolute values of color or brightness. As such, it's not about one color, it's about the contrast.

Check out Jeff Johnson's Designing with the Mind in Mind or Colin Ware's Visual Thinking for Design

Both of those do a much better job at explaining the hows and whys of the average person's visual perception and thus when/where/how black is good/bad.

u/s1e · 10 pointsr/userexperience

No book references? Really? The intro is just a grossly inadequate summary of Elements of User Experience. There is so much more that goes into making an effective UI.

I guess customer empathy maps, scenarios, boxes, arrows & wireframes just aren't sexy enough to show by example, eh? But can't we take it upon ourselves to stop framing the entire profession in terms of appealing high fidelity prototypes? Generations of new designers are being fed ineptly summarised methodologies paired with common sense gestalt principles, making it appear like that's all there is to it. Those people then go out, assuming they have a UX competency, and push pixels around mediocre content, diluting the general perception of UX as a worthwhile endeavour.

u/jimmy0x52 · 9 pointsr/TrueReddit

This was an extremely fascinating read. I've felt this way for a while about social networks and it was part of the reason I finally got off Facebook after so many years.

One clear indication of this I saw frequently was the fact that no one called someone on their birthday any more (or even texted). I was seeing parents even wishing their children Happy Birthday or family members just liking another Happy Birthday post. This kind of impersonal interaction always bugged me.

This article has some great points in it and I hope there is a lot further research put into it. There are a few books cited, and a few others I found related. I've ordered ALL of them and plan to read them all as this is a really fascinating subject for me (a person who was born at the beginning of this era and has become an adult in it with two children who are going to grow up and have to adapt to this).

Books referenced:

You Are Not a Gadget - a Manifesto

Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Eachother

And one related:

The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

u/granolatron · 9 pointsr/userexperience

About Face: The Essentials of Interaction Design is a great primer, with lots of "this is how you do it" step-by-step for each step of the process.

Example: http://imgur.com/Sz9j8wR

u/noeda · 9 pointsr/roguelikedev

The Baconist

(there's no bacon in this game despite the name: I originally was going to make a roguelike about stretching a really long bacon across the dungeon but it's going in a different direction now)

It can be played here: https://submarination.space/baconist132/index.html

Screenshot of one of the unfinished puzzles: https://submarination.space/baconist/puzzle.png

(move with vikeys or numpad or WASD or mouse)

This is a puzzle game where you need to solve puzzles. Right now that means you push boulders like in a sokoban because I haven't got around to implementing actual interesting mechanics yet.

Since past two weeks I've managed to lay down the most important technical foundations:

  • Performance has been slightly improved (still crappy on browser but it's playable; the game can be compiled to native version that runs in a terminal and it's way better in there).
  • Field of view now works more sensibly when you look through portals.
  • Your character can still remember parts of a level that have been seen before (they are shaded darker)
  • I now have a system that makes it fairly easy to design the entire dungeon (I essentially just have a giant text file that's interpreted and turned into world).

    My roguelike can also display animated things. I made my water look like all fancy and animated, a lot like in Brogue but I soon realized this is probably going to be a problem if I use water in puzzles and it has to stand out well from surroundings and look consistent. Sometimes boring-looking things are better. Overall my game has lots of flat colors.

    At this point my concerns are about designing the game mechanics themselves (as opposed to technical challenges).

    Pushing boulders gets boring quickly. I have some unfinished code that would add chain chomp -like enemies to the game and the puzzles would be about how to go around them or neutralize their threat. And I have a sketchbook where I threw in bunch of more ideas. My thinking is to implement wacky ideas and seeing what works. I also have a book on game design I'm going through, trying to educate myself what kind of (puzzle) game would be fun to play.

    I guess this is not really a roguelike. It's a puzzle game and the entire world right now is hand-crafted. There are no random elements to this game whatsoever. But I think that's fine.
u/DiggyDog · 9 pointsr/gamedev

Hey there, I'm a game designer working in AAA and I agree with /u/SuaveZombie that you'll probably be better off with a degree in CS. BUT... don't give up on wanting to be a designer!

 

You should realize that it's not giving up on your dream at all, in fact, it's great advice for how to reach that dream. A designer with an engineering background is going to have a lot more tools at their disposal than one who doesn't.

 

Design is way more than just coming up with a bunch of cool, big ideas. You need to be able to figure out all the details, communicate them clearly to your teammates, and evaluate how well they're working so you can figure out how to make something people will enjoy. In fact, working on a big game often feels like working on a bunch of small games that all connect.

Take your big game idea and start breaking it down into all the pieces that it will need to be complete. For example, GTA has systems for driving and shooting (among many other things). Look at each of those things as its own, smaller game. Even these "small" parts of GTA are actually pretty huge, so try to come up with something as small as possible. Like, super small. Smaller than you think it needs to be. Seriously! You'll eventually be able to make big stuff, but it's not the place to start. Oh, and don't worry if your first game(s) suck. They probably will, and that's fine! The good stuff you make later will be built on the corpses of the small, crappy games you made while you were learning.

 

If you're truly interested in design, you can learn a lot about usability, player psychology, and communication methods without having to shell out $17k for a degree. Same goes for coding (there are tons of free online resources), though a degree will help you get in the door at companies you might be interested in and help provide the structure to keep you going.

 

Here's some books I recommend. Some are specific to games and some aren't, but are relevant for anything where you're designing for someone besides yourself.

 

Universal Principles of Design

The Design of Everyday Things

Rules of Play

The Art of Game Design This and the one below are great books to start with.

A Theory of Fun This is a great one to start with.

Game Feel

• Depending on the type of game you're making, some info on level design would be useful too, but I don't have a specific book to recommend (I've found pieces of many books and articles to be useful). Go play through the developer commentary on Half-Life 2 or Portal for a fun way to get started.

 

Sounds like you're having a tough time, so do your best to keep a positive attitude and keep pushing yourself toward your goals. There's nothing to stop you from learning to make games and starting to make them on your own if that's what you really want to do.

Good luck, work hard!

u/fathermocker · 8 pointsr/DoesAnybodyElse

This is the subject of the book "The Shallows", by Nicholas Carr. I don't completely agree with the guy, but it's thought provoking at least.


Ninja edit: Wait, I just saw the irony of recommending a book.

u/mcdronkz · 8 pointsr/web_design

It's not the advice you are looking for, but I can't stress it enough: design is about problem solving, rather than pure aesthetics.

Sure, making things look pretty is important. However, making your design understandable and easy to use is even more important. It's probably what you should focus on.

You are designing something for real human beings. Your design should solve a real problem in the most elegant way. How? That's something I can't explain in a single comment.

This video series explains it really well. It's not about web applications, but that doesn't matter. The message is the same. You prefer reading? This and this book do an extremely good job of explaining how to design things.

Also, this article explains the point I'm trying to make far better than I ever could. Good luck!

u/SteelPC · 8 pointsr/RimWorld

Tynan I am a huge fan of Rimworld as well as your book which everyone should check out

Designing Games: A Guide to Engineering Experiences https://www.amazon.com/dp/1449337937/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_wh1XBbJFPD7ZB


If you don't mind, any hint on what is next for you? Any glimpse at what your next endeavor might be?

u/mflux · 8 pointsr/gamedesign

The citybound guy has been putting out daily blog posts of his city sim game programming. Wildly ambitious: http://blog.cityboundsim.com/

Not directly city game design but I highly recommend Rimworld creator's book Designing Games: Engineering Experiences for game design. I've emailed him a few times and he's very responsive and forthcoming with his wisdom.

I'm designing a city game myself right now. My theory on these games is that while they are experience engines in the sense that, for example, Sim City triggers your emotions with poverty, wealth, crime, health -- SC tends to be more like gardening: you plant seeds, water them, and see what comes out and much of the enjoyment of playing the game comes from that.

As far as programming goes, I went with a custom entity component system and am using an off the shelf engine (Unreal) to avoid the hard work of optimizing drawing tons of stuff (and lights) on screen.

u/TynanSylvester · 8 pointsr/gamedev
  1. I made a video and posted it on Reddit. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vV6wyeZ7458 There's no trick to it, you just have to make something that looks unique and interesting.

  2. You don't need to invest any money for soundtrack or voice before you've made any income. One exception would be a Kickstarter video soundtrack - but you can get music free or from sites like shockwavesound.com for really cheap.

    Spend money when the concept is a bit proven.

    Of course, this is all deep in the future; you have to make a good game first. Be sure to test with playtesters and watch how they play, using a proper test protocol. <plug :D>My book talks about this kind of thing: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1449337937 </plug>
u/sickhippie · 7 pointsr/incremental_games

Okay, I'll give it another shot and try to get at least to the newer botanical and potions stuff you mentioned earlier. I definitely sympathize with revisiting old code, it's always a roller coaster ride.

Also I can suggest a couple good UI/UX books if you want a step up on that front: User Experience of One, 100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know About People, and UI Is Communication. They won't make you the best UI/UX designer in the world, but they might give you a better understand of the goals of UI and how they relate to the people using them. Understanding what people need out of a UI (which is often different than what they say they want out of a UI) goes a very very long way towards longer interaction periods. Good luck!

Edit: also feel free to hit me up if you want to talk more about UI/UX (or any dev-related) stuff. I'd be happy to help out.

u/Verdonkeremaand · 7 pointsr/GetMotivated

Thanks, I share your feeling. The first time I visited this subreddit I was looking for similar posts. I wondered how people could combine Reddit with their busy life or how they would be able to indeed create stuff by at the same time consuming so much. I could not find any of this idea at that time and I just kept surfing until a few months ago when I started frequenting Reddit less and less.

In the meantime I did not stop thinking about it, read The Shallows by Nicholas Carr and wondered how people could combine all this easy, distracting input (Reddit, Facebook, just surfing in general) with bigger things that require no distractions or 'alone time', like reading, learning a new language, or in your case hoolahooping with fire. My conclusion was that you can't. If you want to go for it, you just have to go for it.

Of course you can combine Reddit with taking a test, but you can not combine it with finishing cum laude. I also realised though that this does not count for most people, they can combine these things, but they do not have the intention to become the new Einstein. It is a whole different discussion if this should even be a personal goal, but my idea was that these new Einsteins are so into the achieving of their dream that this would be really hard to combine with the great entertainment part of the internet and our society. It requires an opt-out, you will have to be an einzelganger at some times and that is exactly what what internet tries to prevent.

You worded this very well in your statement and I agree wholeheartedly. As you can see I'm still on Reddit but not for long. The past few months when I paid Reddit a visit I noticed that the lesser frequency of my visits also made me see the content better. And although I'm subscribed to a whole lot of interesting subreddits and described from all these fun things, I still noticed that I did not need all of this. It gave me a sense of passivity that I should not want in my life.

Nevertheless there are a lot pro-arguments to this website and I see that as well. Because I'm living in the Netherlands, I do not necessarily have to suffer some of the ills that the United States is made of. I can really understand that you need some inspiration of sanity if you live in a small conservative town where everyone is the personal friend of Jesus. So yeah, Reddit should inspire you, but maybe more as in a caravanserai. You meet a lot of new and interesting people, have a good night's sleep and travel on. Staying there also means that you will not arrive at your destination.

The people who say that you should do everything in moderation do not see that this is really hard for some people, but these are the same people that will give you some of the most interesting stuff. They can immerse themselves, lose themselves in Reddit or alike, but if they learn to use this energy in a more enduring way they can use it to write books, build houses or govern countries (just some examples).

In my view it works just like torrents. You have the seeders, who make things. They put in the effort. They show themselves once they finish their product. Their creations will surprise or disappoint. Then, there are the leechers. They wait. They need the seeders and they will criticize or praise the products of the seeder. Most of the time a seeder also leeches, but a lot of leechers tend to forget that they can also be seeders.

TL;DR: Reddit should inspire you, but maybe more as in a caravanserai. You meet a lot of new and interesting people, have a good night's sleep and travel on. Staying there also means that you will not arrive at your destination. Just like torrents, the society consists of seeders and leechers. The OP decided he wanted to be a seeder, I as well.

u/BreakOpen · 7 pointsr/OrthodoxChristianity

I have a similar problem to yours, but it centers more on social media than the internet as a whole. Between random memes, constant political posts/debates, and the generally atheist/anti-religious tones of everything I read, it can be very discouraging and distracting. Particularly if I waste valuable time going down the rabbit hole of comments. Taking breaks from social media has been helpful to me, and it's timely that you've posted this, because I'm considering doing so again.

Related to this, I recommend a great book called The Shallows: What The Internet Is Doing To Our Brains which dives into how the habit of quickly scrolling for small bites of info and moving on can damage our attention spans. Like how people put "TL;DR" at the end of posts because readers get turned off by "walls of text".

Prayers and best wishes to you on regaining your digital footing.

u/trevman · 7 pointsr/MachineLearning

It does in the sense that, very often, for video games the goal isn't to create artificial intelligence, but simulate human player behavior. Usually CPU cycles are reserved for graphics, physics, etc. As GPU's get more powerful and graphics start to plateau, I think you could do some pretty deep AI. But I'd point out I think NN is the wrong form of AI implementation (ironically enough a major feature of a hobby project game of mine is sophisticated AI; but not learning AI).

The silly strategies the bot developed, btw, where basically randomly firing and moving towards and away from other players. Because a NN doesn't have short-term memory, the AI couldn't take stock of the level and learn spawn locations, ambush locations, etc. It had to come up with a general strategy to apply in any situation. It also had no ability to assess threat, though it would prioritize targets.

Furthermore Neuralbot used genetic algorithms and generational death using kill-count as a fitness score. There's a number of issues with that as well. Imagine a bot that was sophisticated enough to dodge all incoming attacks. That is definitely worth breeding with the highest kill count. But using the GA and fitness approach would lead to its death. So you need to come up with some better fitness score, and a better breeding program. Which is basically what I tried to do when I was a teenager and I wanted to learn this stuff. But running multiple Quake2 servers on my crappy PC didn't really work out.

Anyone it's an interesting topic, thanks for bringing it up.

Edit: And BTW none of this is meant to be condescending to Neuralbot. I nearly shit myself when I first started playing with it. I thought it was the coolest thing ever! And it really did inspire me to push some of my programming skills. I keep the site bookmarked for nostalgia purposes. But as I got further into AI I became more disenchanted with it. The book Behind Deep Blue really put me off to it. There's still a lot of research to be done in the field that is wayyyyyy beyond me.

u/HealPlzDev · 7 pointsr/gamedesign

I really enjoyed Designing Games: A Guide to Engineering Experiences by Tynan Sylvester. (The dude behind Rimworld.)

He gives you a lot to think about without ever coming off as pretentious or preachy.

u/w3woody · 6 pointsr/AskAnAmerican

That while I am a huge supporter of individuality and individual rights, there are aspects of the way we approach individuality which makes it harder for people born on the fringes of society to navigate.

In other words, we are slowly creating a society where you damned near need to be a Mensa candidate to wade through all of the crap in order to do more than just barely survive.

And I strongly believe that it is incumbent on those who can to have the heart of a teacher, to try to create a society without so much red tape that you can (as my wife saw at her job at a dialysis center) literally starve because the applications for aid are too hard to fill out and take too long to kick in. (Like the woman who needed protein-rich food for her dialysis--but aid took 30 days to kick in, and she lost everything because of losing her job due to the illness. The saddest part is that it was illegal for my wife to provide her assistance; providing personal aid can get you terminated in the medical profession. So 30 days without any fucking food because of government red tape. (She was sent to the food bank; I hope she was helped.) )

I want to make Designing with the Mind in Mind required reading for anyone designing any sort of system, not just computer interfaces--even things like forms to fill out at a welfare office, or a system of aid through the government. Think of government as a system, with its forms and offices and social workers as its "user interface:" are you harming people because your "interfaces" are poorly thought out?

Because at the bottom of the stack, I think all these well-meaning well-wishers and do-gooders who are working for governments and private aid organizations are (unintentionally) fucking it up for everyone, because in trying to help they have nearly zero consideration for who they are helping or how they are providing that help.

----

Edit: Some of that is word salad; sorry. But it is something that greatly angers me.

u/this_shit · 6 pointsr/philadelphia

It's a scary validation of all the technological-dystopian theories like The Shallows. I used to be much more dismissive of the idea that facebook/media bubbles/instant gratification was hurting society.

But here we are.

u/subtextual · 6 pointsr/Neuropsychology

You might take a look at Nicholas Carr's 2011 book The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to our Brain. The same author also has a new book out on the effects of automation in general on the human brain. Carr's 2011 book was a finalist for the Pulitzer, though it's not without it's detractors -- at the very least, it cites a lot of research and should give you some background on some of the major researchers and ideas in the field. BTW, I think the field is called Human-Computer Interaction (and that's what Amazon calls books on this topic), though HCI also covers making computers and technology easier for people to use.

u/ladiesngentlemenplz · 6 pointsr/askphilosophy

The Scharff and Dusek reader has been mentioned, but I'd like to put a plug in for the Kaplan reader as well.

The following are also worth checking out...

Peter Paul Verbeek's What Things Do (this is my "if you only read one book about Phil Tech, read this book" book)

Michel Callon's "The Sociology of an Actor-Network"

Don Ihde's Technology and the Lifeworld

Andy Feenberg's Questioning Technology

Albert Borgman's Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life

Martin Heidegger's "The Question Concerning Technology"

Lewis Mumford's Technics and Civilization

Jacques Ellul's The Technological Society

Langdon Winner's "Do Artifacts Have Politics" and The Whale and the Reactor

Hans Jonas' "Technology and Responsibility"

Sunstein and Thaler's Nudge

Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death

Nicholas Carr's The Shallows and The Glass Cage

u/Wayne_Enterprises_ · 6 pointsr/userexperience

This should get you started :)

Books:

u/snortlepop · 6 pointsr/LucidDreaming

Maybe look up some info on video-game design and augmented reality. It's all created by human programmers (ignoring AI in recent years), and if someone else can create an entire virtual world from scratch, so you can you! Even better, you don't have to "reinvent the wheel" when it comes to dreams. You can even cut out the death-march of constantly trying to improve graphics software/hardware (unless you really want to spend a few months trying to get rain wetness to "look right") and skip straight to the cool stuff.

I'd recommend starting with something easy and objective, like a Diegetic Interface rather than trying for something subjective which only you can see. Do you have a favorite interface from a video-game that you like? You can image it appearing on a clear piece of glass in front of you. Later on you can try [wearing] the piece of glass and have yourself a old fashioned HUD. Mess around with different ways to display information and maybe even go for a book on interface design like About Face or The Joy of UX.

edit: clarity

u/RodeoMonkey · 6 pointsr/gamedev

Tynan Sylvester also wrote my favorite book on game design, which touches on emergence quite a bit. He has a simple, but good definition: "Emergence is when simple mechanics interact to create complex situations." Title is appropriate, Designing Games: A Guide to Engineering Experiences

https://www.amazon.com/Designing-Games-Guide-Engineering-Experiences/dp/1449337937/

u/iamktothed · 6 pointsr/Design

An Essential Reading List For Designers

Source: www.tomfaulkner.co.uk

All books have been linked to Amazon for review and possible purchase. Remember to support the authors by purchasing their books. If there are any issues with this listing let me know via comments or pm.

Architecture

u/wizdumb · 6 pointsr/webdev

Give Skipfish a try. It was written and open sourced by Michal Zalewski, author of Silence on the Wire.

u/tyfairclough · 5 pointsr/userexperience

Your better off getting hold of some good e-books and reading those and running through them.

Story Mapping by Jeff Patton
If you don't already story map then you have a lot to learn, if you do this book helps you home that skill to a fine art.
http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920033851.do

Lean UX by Jeff Gothelf
How lean processes and UX work hand in hand
http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920021827.do

lean ux for startups:
http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920026242.do

Imagine by Marty Cagan
A product management book every UX designer should read.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B001AQ95UY?btkr=1

Hooked by Nir Eyal
An interesting works around user habits and how to creating habit forming products.
http://www.amazon.com/Hooked-How-Build-Habit-Forming-Products-ebook/dp/B00HJ4A43S

Design with the Mind in Mind by Jeff Johnson
Something I'm reading now that I've found quite interesting. I like anything that gives scientific observations of human behaviour to help drive my decision making.
http://www.amazon.com/Designing-Mind-Second-Understanding-Guidelines/dp/0124079148/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1416221732&sr=1-1&keywords=designing+with+the+mind+in+mind&pebp=1416221734239

There's classics like don't make me think and the design of every day things by Steve Krug and Don Norman (these are more broad in scope).

I ready a great paper from Nielson group about conducting user research (userlabs, tests, whatever you want to call it):
www.nngroup.com

That's plenty to sink your teeth into.

u/fajitaman · 5 pointsr/NoFap

The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing To Our Brains

I think NoFap is really just a niche part of a bigger drive to get away from the internet (or at least use it differently), and I completely agree with all of it. The internet (if used without taking precautions) and porn both change the physical structures of our brains in ways that preclude having a fulfilling life with longterm satisfaction. Fortunately our brains are very plastic and it's not too late to fix them.

I've tried quitting the internet cold turkey, and it's haaaaaard. The problem is that it's a global addiction that's deeply intertwined with our social and work lives. You can't really get away from it without totally alienating yourself, so quitting all of the internet is not viable. It's very difficult to draw the line between useful or necessary internet usage and bad internet usage, so moderating your own internet usage can be tough.

Here's my attempt at drawing that line, though:

  • If you're using the internet for data acquisition or communication, you're using it right.
  • If you're using the internet for education or entertainment, you're using it wrong.

    Obviously education and entertainment are important, but the internet is just not the place to do it. With respect to education, the internet will promote distractedness and a habit of multitasking, and ultimately your learning will suffer (the book I mentioned focuses on this). If you want to learn, try to use the internet to find books, and then use those books to learn (or take a class, etc).

    There are, of course, certain things you can learn only through the internet. Tutorials, for example, are online, as is the vast majority of modern journalism. You need to be careful with either of these. When it comes to reading the news, I like to use my tablet and the Pulse application, and I'm only subscribed to longer-form journalism like the type you'd see in The Atlantic. When it comes to tutorials, do whatever you can to not open additional browser tabs. In either case, you should at the very least read these things like you would read a book. Don't allow yourself to get distracted by hyperlinks, and if some topic confuses you, usually it's okay to just ignore it (or mark it) and press on, rather than try to immediately learn about this other topic through outside sources.

    As for entertainment, that's something you can do in real life with real people (or again, with more reading, which is always healthy). Entertainment online is a process of overstimulation and isolation. Porn falls into this, but so do videogames and even mindlessly clicking pictures on reddit. In general, if you get on the internet without a clear purpose, you will probably be using it for entertainment, so always try to tell yourself why you're getting online before you do it.

    The first good use for the internet is data acquisition, by which I mean it's a good place to go to find a fact or set of facts. For example, if you want to go see a movie it makes perfect sense to get on the internet and look up movie times. In these situations, you'll get online, find the information you want, and then quit.

    Communication is a bit iffier, and maybe it should come with its own set of restrictions. Email and social networking are great, insofar as we don't use them for entertainment. I don't really suffer from this problem, but when I get on facebook it becomes pretty clear that many people are sort of addicted to self-posts and being heard. This might be absolutely fine for all I know (you could liken it to journaling), so for now I'm going to just assume that social networking, love or hate, is something we're going to have to live with if we want to partake in the 21st century.

    This might warrant its own post, since I've got quite a bit to say on it (I've kept most of it inside my head, so it might be totally rubbish for anyone else as far as I know).

u/swirlingdoves · 5 pointsr/Polska

@1. Mysle ze pytanie ktore trzeba zadac sobie najpierw to "czym jest dobry game design". Ile ludzi bedzie gralo w dana gre? Ile pieniedzy gra zarobi? Jaki efekt bedzie miala na graczach? Ogolnie polecam fora czy nawet subreddity typu /r/gamedesign. Sa tez kursy oferowane za darmo online przez powazne uczelnie np MIT. Z ksiazek polecam Theory of Fun i The Art of Game Design

@2 Tak, spojz na Notch'a ;)

@3 Rob male, proste gierki. Polecam "game jams" Nie wiem jakie to popularne w Polsce ale w Internecie jest tego sporo i po krotce chodzi o taki "sprint" (na przyklad 24 godzinny lub jedno-weekendowy) podczas ktorego celem jest zrobienie gdy na podstwie jakiego hasla lub protych ktryteriow. Znajdz innych ludzi i zamiast samotnie, pracuj w grupie powiedzmy trzech osob co by sie wzajemnie motywowac.

u/CSMastermind · 4 pointsr/learnprogramming

I've posted this before but I'll repost it here:

Now in terms of the question that you ask in the title - this is what I recommend:

Job Interview Prep


  1. Cracking the Coding Interview: 189 Programming Questions and Solutions
  2. Programming Interviews Exposed: Coding Your Way Through the Interview
  3. Introduction to Algorithms
  4. The Algorithm Design Manual
  5. Effective Java
  6. Concurrent Programming in Java™: Design Principles and Pattern
  7. Modern Operating Systems
  8. Programming Pearls
  9. Discrete Mathematics for Computer Scientists

    Junior Software Engineer Reading List


    Read This First


  10. Pragmatic Thinking and Learning: Refactor Your Wetware

    Fundementals


  11. Code Complete: A Practical Handbook of Software Construction
  12. Software Estimation: Demystifying the Black Art
  13. Software Engineering: A Practitioner's Approach
  14. Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code
  15. Coder to Developer: Tools and Strategies for Delivering Your Software
  16. Perfect Software: And Other Illusions about Testing
  17. Getting Real: The Smarter, Faster, Easier Way to Build a Successful Web Application

    Understanding Professional Software Environments


  18. Agile Software Development: The Cooperative Game
  19. Software Project Survival Guide
  20. The Best Software Writing I: Selected and Introduced by Joel Spolsky
  21. Debugging the Development Process: Practical Strategies for Staying Focused, Hitting Ship Dates, and Building Solid Teams
  22. Rapid Development: Taming Wild Software Schedules
  23. Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams

    Mentality


  24. Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency
  25. Against Method
  26. The Passionate Programmer: Creating a Remarkable Career in Software Development

    History


  27. The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering
  28. Computing Calamities: Lessons Learned from Products, Projects, and Companies That Failed
  29. The Deadline: A Novel About Project Management

    Mid Level Software Engineer Reading List


    Read This First


  30. Personal Development for Smart People: The Conscious Pursuit of Personal Growth

    Fundementals


  31. The Clean Coder: A Code of Conduct for Professional Programmers
  32. Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship
  33. Solid Code
  34. Code Craft: The Practice of Writing Excellent Code
  35. Software Craftsmanship: The New Imperative
  36. Writing Solid Code

    Software Design


  37. Head First Design Patterns: A Brain-Friendly Guide
  38. Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software
  39. Domain-Driven Design: Tackling Complexity in the Heart of Software
  40. Domain-Driven Design Distilled
  41. Design Patterns Explained: A New Perspective on Object-Oriented Design
  42. Design Patterns in C# - Even though this is specific to C# the pattern can be used in any OO language.
  43. Refactoring to Patterns

    Software Engineering Skill Sets


  44. Building Microservices: Designing Fine-Grained Systems
  45. Software Factories: Assembling Applications with Patterns, Models, Frameworks, and Tools
  46. NoEstimates: How To Measure Project Progress Without Estimating
  47. Object-Oriented Software Construction
  48. The Art of Software Testing
  49. Release It!: Design and Deploy Production-Ready Software
  50. Working Effectively with Legacy Code
  51. Test Driven Development: By Example

    Databases


  52. Database System Concepts
  53. Database Management Systems
  54. Foundation for Object / Relational Databases: The Third Manifesto
  55. Refactoring Databases: Evolutionary Database Design
  56. Data Access Patterns: Database Interactions in Object-Oriented Applications

    User Experience


  57. Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability
  58. The Design of Everyday Things
  59. Programming Collective Intelligence: Building Smart Web 2.0 Applications
  60. User Interface Design for Programmers
  61. GUI Bloopers 2.0: Common User Interface Design Don'ts and Dos

    Mentality


  62. The Productive Programmer
  63. Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change
  64. Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming
  65. Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering

    History


  66. Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software
  67. New Turning Omnibus: 66 Excursions in Computer Science
  68. Hacker's Delight
  69. The Alchemist
  70. Masterminds of Programming: Conversations with the Creators of Major Programming Languages
  71. The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood

    Specialist Skills


    In spite of the fact that many of these won't apply to your specific job I still recommend reading them for the insight, they'll give you into programming language and technology design.

  72. Peter Norton's Assembly Language Book for the IBM PC
  73. Expert C Programming: Deep C Secrets
  74. Enough Rope to Shoot Yourself in the Foot: Rules for C and C++ Programming
  75. The C++ Programming Language
  76. Effective C++: 55 Specific Ways to Improve Your Programs and Designs
  77. More Effective C++: 35 New Ways to Improve Your Programs and Designs
  78. More Effective C#: 50 Specific Ways to Improve Your C#
  79. CLR via C#
  80. Mr. Bunny's Big Cup o' Java
  81. Thinking in Java
  82. JUnit in Action
  83. Functional Programming in Scala
  84. The Art of Prolog: Advanced Programming Techniques
  85. The Craft of Prolog
  86. Programming Perl: Unmatched Power for Text Processing and Scripting
  87. Dive into Python 3
  88. why's (poignant) guide to Ruby
u/AndrewRichmo · 4 pointsr/nonfictionbookclub

This is the list I have right now, but I might take something off before tomorrow.

Walden – Henry David Thoreau

The Blind Watchmaker – Richard Dawkins


The Shallows: What The Internet Is Doing To Our Brains – Nicholas Carr

Why Leaders Lie: The Truth About Lying in International Politics – John J. Mearsheimer

Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster – Svetlana Alexievich

u/quiltedvino · 4 pointsr/C_S_T

Once you sober up from all that weed, you might want to read this - it's basically a cogent version of what you're talking about here.

u/joe_the_bartender · 4 pointsr/AskReddit

Fantastic book by Nicolas Carr called "The Shallows" which deals heavily with how technology has influenced how we think, perceive, and retain information. link is here!

*edit link fixed

u/IllusiveObserver · 4 pointsr/socialism

I am now. I was aware of his famous interview on Crossfire with William Buckley, but I didn't know his politics were expressed in his music.

I've read too much about media ecology to stomach the state of telecommunications as it stands today. While I primarily mentioned the capitalist appropriation of TV in my first comment, I think its much more than that. Even when we adopt socialism and kill advertising, TV must be eliminated as a medium of communication. It is inimical to rational thinking. It is inimical to learning and truly understanding. The way the brain processes information from the medium is inherently insidious.

Similar arguments can be made about computers and the internet. I'm not against telecommunications completely, but I am extremely cautious of new technology. Read these books, and you'll be scared of even touching your phone.

The Shallows

Alone Together

The Digital Divide

Distracted

The Dumbest Generation

As an engineer who became a socialist in large part because I saw that technology was being used to exploit the people I want to help, I can tell you that the question posed to mankind will be that of our relation to technology. We will already have tackled that problem indirectly when we deal with climate change, but that is really a problem of capitalism. We will have to confront it honestly when capitalism falls.

u/vintermann · 4 pointsr/programming

I inherited this book from a late relative:

http://www.amazon.com/Psychology-Human-Computer-Interaction-Stuart-Card/dp/0898598591

that was my intro to the topic.

u/davidNerdly · 4 pointsr/web_design

Just some I like:

Dev


  • [You Don't Know Javascript (series)(]https://github.com/getify/You-Dont-Know-JS). Short and sweet mostly. Well written. Some are still pending publishing but there are a couple available now. I believe you can read them for free online, I just like paper books and wanted to show some support.

  • Elequent Javascript (second release coming in november). Current version here if you are impatient. I have not personally read it yet, waiting for the next revision. I recommend it due to the high regard it has in the web community.

  • Professional JavaScript for Web Developers. Sometimes called the bible of js. Big ole book. I have not read it through and through, but have enjoyed the parts I have perused.

    Design


    (I am weak in the design side, so take these recommendation with a grain of salt. I recommend them off of overall industry cred they receive and my own personal taste for them.)

  • The Elements of Typographic Style. Low level detail into the art and science behind typography.

  • Don't Make Me Think, Revisited. I read the original, not the new one that I linked. It is an easy read (morning commute on the train was perfect for it) and covers UX stuff in a very easy to understand way. My non-designer brain really appreciated it.

    below are books I have not read but our generally recommended to people asking this question

  • About Face.

  • The Design of Everyday Things.

  • The Inmates Are Running the Asylum.


    You can see a lot of these are theory based. My 0.02 is that books are good for theory, blogs are good for up to date ways of doing things and tutorial type stuff.

    Hope this helps!


    Battery is about to die so no formatting for you! I'll add note later if I remember.

    EDIT: another real quick.

    EDIT2: Eh, wound up on my computer. Added formatting and some context. Also added more links because I am procrastinating my actual work I have to do (picking icons for buttons is so hard, I never know what icon accurately represents whatever context I am trying to fill).
u/Spacegeek7 · 4 pointsr/technology

Jaron Lanier, Who is considered the godfather of virtual reality and has been around Silicon Valley for decades, recently wrote a book that really summarizes all of the reasons why social media is bad, even if you don’t think it affects you. He certainly explains it better than I could, and while I had already left Facebook a few years ago, his recent book and interviews convinced me to leave google as well.

Book : Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now https://www.amazon.com/dp/125019668X/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_4mKVBbKCTFAYG

Interview: https://youtu.be/kc_Jq42Og7Q

u/wizardU2032 · 4 pointsr/gamedesign

The best book by someone who's been commercially successful is Designing Games, by Tynan Sylvester of Rimworld: https://smile.amazon.com/Designing-Games-Guide-Engineering-Experiences/dp/1449337937/

It is the best at actually applying all of the navelgazing people tend to do when talking about game design and art and theory and so forth towards actually creating compelling structures and content for games.

u/annihilatron · 4 pointsr/RimWorld

one of the things in his book is that a game should be a story that the player has some hand in (paraphrasing, a lot)

the tornado doesn't do squat for that. It's a cool concept but it doesn't tell a story, it doesn't interact with the player, and there's no sense of reward or difficulty in preventing it / countering it / recovering for it.

It's very much just a "YOU'RE SCREWED" stamp on the colony and you have to find a way to fix it.

u/TheJeizon · 4 pointsr/RimWorld

I picked up your book recently. I think this discussion just pushed it to the top of my reading list. More insight on how hidden mechanics lead to in game results vs. human perceptions/internal thought process will be good.

Keep on coding man, great game.

u/lazylex · 4 pointsr/MMORPG

These are interesting and insightful reads:

https://www.amazon.com/MMOs-Inside-Out-Massively-multiplayer-Role-playing/dp/1484217233/

https://www.amazon.com/MMOs-Outside-Massively-Multiplayer-Role-Playing-Psychology/dp/1484217802

Might be available cheaper at some other locations -- google Bartle mmo book

Also Raph Koster's more universal video game book:
https://www.amazon.com/Theory-Game-Design-Raph-Koster/dp/1449363210/

u/UX_love · 4 pointsr/suggestmeabook

The guide to how to do it:

Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products https://www.amazon.com/dp/1591847788/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_10WrDbBQA46KY

The book about how it’s damaging us:

Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01HNJIK70/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_v1WrDbAC84ESN

u/urb3000 · 4 pointsr/nosurf

Adam Alter is a marketing and psychology professor at NYU's Stern School of Business.

On Amazon you can read through the first couple of pages (hover over the book cover and click 'look inside').

Even the creators of these apps and devices recognize the potential for addiction. Steve Jobs for example, didn't let his kids use an iPad. The Instagram founder said "there's always another hashtag".

Even the presence of a smartphone without it being used, just it by itself sitting there is enough to disrupt sociability.

I really recommend reading the introduction to this book, it's free!

I'll start part one when I buy it!

u/CorvidaeSF · 3 pointsr/ScienceTeachers

Hey yo, thanks for stopping in with your question! I'm 34, a teacher, and I have the same problem. Seriously. Right now I am procrastinating working on a letter of recommendation ;)

Part of dealing with overcoming this bad habit is understanding why it happens. Basically, animals like things that give us a burst of happiness in the form of endorphins being released and absorbed by our brain cells. Many different things give us these endorphin rushes. Eating a tasty food, seeing something beautiful, laughing at something funny, etc. But one of the best things to give us endorphin rushes--and part of the reason we as humans have been so successful as a species--is collecting new information/learning something.

We need to collect new information. Our brains are wired from birth to desire it like air. We collect it over our lives to navigate and survive our surroundings, then pass it on to the next generation as best we can. Now, of course can do collect new information by, you know, learning something, but the problem is that learning something often takes effort. The deeper the understanding, the more the effort. So learning subjects that are complex take a lot of work before you get that endorphin rush payoff when you understand something for the first time. By contrast, connecting with people via text/social media, reading things on the internet, playing games, etc, these are all things that give us endorphin rushes with far far less effort. The more we use them, the more our brain expects to get that endorphin rush with little effort, so when something comes along that requires more effort for the same endorphin rush, our brains rebel and are like, fuck this, why are we putting in all this work for endorphins when there's an easier way sitting right next to us on the table there?

Now (hopefully) you might be thinking to yourself, gee, isn't this similar to drug addiction where people become so used to the rush from drugs that regular things in life don't do it for them anymore? And the answer is yes it absolutely is. I have a book right next to me on my desk I am planning on reading this summer that specifically deconstructs how some types of social media and casual games are specifically designed to trigger addictive behavior in their users. There was also a television interview recently that discussed the same thing.

Now. I am not saying everyone needs to throw out their cell phones and other devices. Clearly there are massive benefits to these technologies as well as risks. We just need to understand these risks better and learn to manage our own behavior a little more consciously. Just like there is a difference between having an alcoholic drink every once in a while and being a clinical alcoholic, there's a responsible way to use tools and technologies that might otherwise be dangerous.

Which is exactly what you're already asking about, so awesome! Getting started on such behaviors now, while your brain is young and growing, will have massive benefits as you get older. Active techniques like the Pomodoro Method work for many people, I definitely recommend checking it out. I also actually recommend checking out mindfulness meditation. Regular meditation for as little as a few minutes a day has had scientifically proven effects in long-term rewiring of the brain to improve focus and clarity. There are a ton of websites and videos and apps and resources out there. I recommend the app HeadSpace, it has a free guided ten-session series that really walks you through the basis of mindfulness meditation and why it's important. You can pay for an account later if you want more but their free intro ten-series is fantastic and if thats all you work with you will be way ahead of the game.

Good luck!

u/autophage · 3 pointsr/webdev

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.

u/Northus · 3 pointsr/SocialEngineering

There are plenty of books on the topic, such as Irresistible:

https://www.amazon.com/Irresistible-Addictive-Technology-Business-Keeping/dp/1594206643

u/notscientific · 3 pointsr/technology

For those who want to read more about the topic, I suggest you read Eli Pariser's book. Eli Pariser is the guy who gave the TED talk embedded in the blog post.

u/ldd- · 3 pointsr/politics

Regarding the online echo chamber you note, you should read Eli Pariser's book The Filter Bubble . . . you can also watch his TED Talk here

u/duotoner · 3 pointsr/web_design

A Word of Caution on Inspiration Galleries

Seeking inspiration (ideas) is perfectly acceptable, but it must be done so cautiously. Too often, people fall into the trap of simply copying the sources of inspiration because it looked nice.

Instead, it's helpful to study the source of inspiration. Which components are interesting? Why were they used? What problem was the designer attempting to solve with them? Once you understand why those components were used, then you are better positioned to decide if they help solve your design problem.

It's also helpful to remember that no two design problems are the same. Sure, you're a bank and we're a bank, but we have different needs, target different audiences, have different value propositions, different brands, and so on. Thus, our design solutions will necessarily differ.

Some Helpful Resources

As for helpful resources, I would start with a video from Flint McGlaughlin on the inverted marketing funnel. You're probably already familiar with the funnel concept from marketing, but he describes it as fulfilling a sequence of "micro yes" points. If you have a good understanding of how the user moves through these "micro yes" moments, then it can help you decide where to choose and place elements on a page. For example, should your call-to-action be above the fold? Do you need pictures? Are stock photos okay? And so on.

Going more in-depth, I would recommend looking to The Elements of User Experience by Jesse James Garrett. You can find lecture videos from him on YouTube covering the ideas.

Another book on the essential reading list is Don't Make Me Think, Revisited by Steve Krug. It's a fantastic book on usability and user experience.

For a slightly more graphic design bent, although still applicable, I would recommend The Non-Designer's Design Book by Robin Williams. It will help you understand the basic components of graphic design which can be applied to web design.

What all these resources do is give you a basic framework through which you can make better design decisions.

Design is fundamentally about problem solving. You are not creating a design simply for the sake of the "design." You are creating a design to accomplish some goal. This is true of graphic designer, web design, user experience design, interaction design, and even industrial design.

u/lloyddobbler · 3 pointsr/userexperience

Overflow looks interesting, particularly vbecause of the Sketch integration.

TBH, up until recently I've still been using OmniGraffle, with a healthy dose of stencils/templates to support the workflows I'm used to.

I specifically work with Jesse James Garrett's Visual Vocabulary, which I think is still the best way to demonstrate user interactions. In his book The Elements of User Experience he makes the point that the visual/"surface" layer should be separated out in planning from the structural layer. I agree wholeheartedly with this directive. For that reason, a tool like Overflow or Invision comes in handy at the very end of the design process - but in the midst of planning user flows, one should be working firmly in the world of "boxes and arrows."

That's why right now, my current go-to choice is Whimsical. While I can ultimately paste imagery in as-desired, from the beginning, it lets me be better able to work in boxes-and-arrows until I develop the full scale of the user flow.

(That being said, for a strictly "illustrating the visual interaction that I've already created the structure for" purpose, Overflow seems like a winner. I just wouldn't skip the first (structural) part of the process.)

u/Dr_Terrible · 3 pointsr/bestof

If you enjoyed the article, Nick Carr wrote a follow-up book called The Shallows which expands greatly on his argument. One of the best books I read last year.

u/tofapornottofap4 · 3 pointsr/pornfree

I would suggest reading this wonderful wonderful book on internet addiction.

I very strongly associate to this void of porn being filled by other useless stuff on the internet. I also strongly relate to the fact that if I'm wasting time on the internet, it means I'm escaping from something else - usually some difficult work.

I realized that a huge amount of time wasting for me started off from an impulse. For example, I'd just type facebook blindly into the browser. I first used a pop-up kind of plugin for reddit and signed out of my facebook account. This forced me to "agree to see website" or sign in manually into facebook, which made me much more minful of these impulses. Following that, and after I completed reading the above book, I deleted my facebook account and started using only throwaways for certain subs that I was interested in. I still have to deal with youtube however.

As is mentioned in one of the other comments, buying a newspaper or magazine subscription really helps. It's amazing to see how much of deep-reading skills I'd lost due to mindless internet browsing, clickbait headlines and bite-sized memes. I'm also reading a book for a half hour a day before sleeping, but this is hard to enforce too, given netflix.

Thanks actually! While writing this I've become more mindful of what I need to do next :D

u/my_favourite_axe · 3 pointsr/intj

Social media is a good call, but I actually think it's not only that, but browsing in general - it's been very well described in a book called The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. I'd recommend to minimise browsing the internet and try to replace it with reading longer texts (yes, it's quite ironic to give this advice on Reddit).

How would you describe your attention span/focus in general?

u/coldfrontin · 3 pointsr/bonnaroo

You just reminded me where I learned this.

u/philipp_w · 3 pointsr/Showerthoughts

It's sad, isn't it?

But still, there is a lot more to the Internet than just consumption and advertising. Wikipedia has changed how we approach something so boring as an encyclopedia. Stackoverflow is the Q&A site - spawning many more under the StackExchange roof (or maybe you're more a Quora-type?). edX, Coursers, MIT OpenCourseWare and many more make it easier to get access to top-notch information (although you still have to study it yourself).

Google Maps brought cheap navigation to the masses and my be the best tool at our disposal to help the ever-increasing traffic jams.

Facebook has the potential to create diverse communities around the most obscure things.

And then there's Reddit - a plethora of communities of interest culminating into one front page.

The Internet (just like any other medium) is what you make of it.

P.S.: If I may suggest a book on this The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains.

u/fazool · 3 pointsr/UXResearch

I started in market research as well before transitioning to a UX Researcher. These are the standouts from the reading list I started with:

The Elements of User Experience - A great intro to the whole field of UX. In-depth and covers the user centered design process.

Don't Make Me Think Short but comprehensive book on usability.

Handbook of Usability Testing Everything you need to know about usability testing.

Interviewing Users This book is great and is one I go back to regularly. The author Steve Portigal, also has a podcast on user research, "Dollars to Donuts" which is worth checking out.

Another comment mentioned the Jeff Sauro book which is very good, and also the Userfocus blog and newsletter. I've done David Travis' courses as well and would recommend them to people new to the field.

https://www.usability.gov/ is a great resource for templates, methods, definitions etc.

NN/g and UIE are my two most read blogs/newsletters.




u/Yarsl · 3 pointsr/usability

First, define who you need to interview. Do you need a mix of ages and genders? Do you need people who are early adopters? Do you need people who are in the VR/AR space? What sort of target market do you need to test the waters for?

Second, you need to recruit. Talk to participant recruiting agencies in advance - usually they need ~2 weeks to secure and schedule participants. $150 would be a reasonable honorarium per participant for 3 hours, but you will have to pay the agencies above and beyond what you give participants. Otherwise, you can go the cheaper Craigslist route and send out a screener questionnaire (to screen out the people you don't want), then call or email the people who you want to talk to. Follow up 2 days in advance with each participant to confirm attendance. As a last resort, you can use the "friends and family" recruit method. But since you have time, I would highly discourage that.

Third, you need someone to conduct the studies: drop $40 on the Handbook of Usability Testing if you are going to try conducting the interviews yourself. (Be wary of leading questions - it doesn't matter how much money you throw at a study if the interviewer / moderator is not able to collect good data.) Or, hire a contract UX Researcher; you would need a much higher budget for that, but it is well worth the money.

Source: am a UX Researcher

u/IndependentBoof · 3 pointsr/compsci

> What does being a UX specialist entail?

It can vary quite a bit. Most of my time in UX was spent as a usability consultant. I worked with external clients (anywhere from mobile tech and eCommerce to health care and b2b interaction) to design, conduct, and report the findings of usability studies to improve their products (or address whatever need they had). This can involve a lot of different research methods including eye tracking, surveys, contextual inquiry, etc., but most commonly involved "user studies" where you bring in their target audience to use the product and provide feedback. Using a combination of performance metrics, subjective feedback, and other information gathered, we reported back to the client and usually included some re-design suggestions.

There are three major areas of UX: computer science, psychology/cognitive science, and design. Depending on your emphasis in these fields, a UX job can vary greatly from doing mostly Information Architecture (IA) and graphical design to software engineering with a concentration on UX principles and how they fit into development (such as through Behavior Driven Design).

> Any good reading recommendations on good UX practices?

UX learns a lot from Human Factors & Ergonomics (a field within Psychology) and a must read for anyone interested in HF&E (and/or usability) is Donald Norman's "Psychology of Everyday Things" They also re-released the book titled "Design of Everyday Things." It's informative, fun, and easy to read.

For an introduction to UX methods, I suggest Rogers/Sharp/Preece's "Interaction Design. There are other books that will go into more depth, but those two will give you a strong foundation.

u/themusicdan · 3 pointsr/chess

Sounds like a pile of B.S.

I encourage reading http://amazon.com/Behind-Deep-Blue-Building-Computer/dp/0691118183 (if you don't want to purchase it, visit a library and request it).

u/ohmantics · 3 pointsr/programming

This doesn't match up with the account in "Behind Deep Blue." http://www.amazon.com/Behind-Deep-Blue-Building-Computer/dp/0691118183

That book describes the move search algorithms in detail and explains that because there was extra time, Deep Blue searched some non-profitable portions of the game tree and found an even better move. Kasparov had come to assume that computers always pruned the game tree based on maximum profitability of move and shouldn't have made that move.

u/gbnikolov · 3 pointsr/design_critiques

Honestly, I don't even know where to start.. No offense intended, but you are in the very beginning of digital design. This is not to say that you don't have the technical skills, but that you should study more visual design theory. Good design has rules, which are learnable. Below is a book list, which I think will be a great value to you:

http://www.amazon.com/Ordering-Disorder-Principles-Design-Voices/dp/0321703537/

http://www.amazon.com/About-Face-Essentials-Interaction-Design/dp/1118766571/

http://www.amazon.com/Principles-Beautiful-Web-Design/dp/0992279445/

I don't want to discourage you, your page will look much better if you read only one of these.

u/plaka888 · 3 pointsr/CrappyDesign

I lead design teams, and have been a designer of many colors for years. I start EVERYONE that asks this question with Tufte, because he's Not a designer, explores information design (which UI design is largely a subset of, IMO) from various angles, and non-designers have heard of him on NPR or some other bullshit, so they feel "in the know" once they read a book, and get more interested. I don't agree with many of his assertions, but one could start off much worse. Next, Alan Cooper and Rob Reimann's About Face 3: The Essentials of Interaction Design is excellent, also Moggridge's Designing Interactions (dated, but always applicable). There's plenty of other stuff out there, many of the Amazon "people who bought this" recs that show up on Rob's book are solid books by solid designers.

Edit: EVERYONE -> everyone not hired to do design that asks about it at work

Edit 2: There's a 4th edition of About Face, I just noticed. Really anything Alan or Rob do is excellent.

u/Kenark · 3 pointsr/gamedesign

I highly recommend Designing Games: A Guide to Engineering Experiences.

It's a hard to describe book but it's worth a read. For one, he defines a video game as a series of mechanics to interact with one another to create an experience. Something unique to our medium. Storytelling through mechanics interacting with one another and creating a fiction within your own head.

The game he's creating right now, Rimworld, applies that concept and simulates a living breathing colony with pawns that have likes and dislikes, strengths and weaknesses. They have jobs they want to do, will do it if they have to or certain jobs they won't do at all. You set a list of priorities for your colony and let things play out with no (practical) way of controlling individual pawns directly.

They also simulate relationships within the game and the pawns will remember interactions with one another. They will dislike one another if they're insulted and they'll break if a loved one dies. They'll visit the graves of people who died years/seasons ago.

All these mechanics interact with each other to create a story in your head that's different with every colony you start. That kind of storytelling is unique to our medium, he says. So that's how I can best describe the first half of the book.

The second half of the book is more about the iterative process of creating the game itself. Creating iterative loops where you add in features, polish and then loop again until release. It's a more complex half to describe shortly but just as important as the design process itself.

u/KenFlorentino · 3 pointsr/gamedev

Fellow enterprise developer turned manager here. Me and my cohort are about to release our first title. It was developed using .NET/C#.

AMA. :)

I'll start with the questions you have above.

Assuming you already have a solid foundation in OOP, Design Patterns, some basic RDBMS, etc, you actually already have 60% of what you need. Code is code.

The other 40% depends on the type of game you are making. 2D? Basic algebra. 3D? Now it gets tougher on the math (though thankfully today's engines do most of the heavy lifting for you, but you still need to understand what is used for what).

Doing multi-player? Now networking is the tricky part because you are likely to use some sort of UDP communication layer and all the REST/SOAP you learned at work, while still useful for managing latency-agnostic stuff like player lists, matchmaking requests and such, won't cut it for real-time multi-player games. Writing solid "netcode" that delivers a great experience at 60+ FPS requires some creativity in managing perception (extrapolation and interpolation when latency is present) and fault-tolerant algorithms. It is no fun when you get a headshot in an FPS, see it happen, but your opponent runs away, apparently unscathed.

As far as graphics, I solved that one easily... I had a friend join my project who was the graphics guy. I provided the framework for doing the graphics and turned that area over to him. He went above and beyond though and learned shaders and added all sorts of special effects.

Meanwhile, I focused my energy on the game engine, networking layers, AWS cloud stuff, matchmaking and lots of behind the scenes stuff.

The other thing I did was read as much as possible about Game Design. I ordered a dozen books from Amazon, including my absolute favorite Designing Games by Tynan Sylvester, the developer of RimWorld (link: https://www.amazon.com/Designing-Games-Guide-Engineering-Experiences/dp/1449337937).

Hope that helps!



u/Ponzel · 3 pointsr/gamedev

Since you mentioned Rimworld: Tynan, the creator of Rimworld has a gamasutra post and a book about how he designs games. (Spoiler: It's all about the story experienced by the player).

I can tell you about the thought process for my colony simulator:

  1. I want to have a prototype as fast as possible, so the system should be as simple as possible.
  2. The focus of the game are the colonists, their personality and their emotions when something good or bad happens.

    Therefore I only have a couple (~10) resources that are not even items on the map, but are simply counted in the UI, like in a strategy game. If you're looking for inspiration, you can download it for free on the website.

    For your game, I think you could first think about what the focus is in your game. Do you want the player to spend more time managing resources, handling colonists, building stuff, or defending the colony? Then plan around your focus. Hope this helps you :)
u/morrison539 · 3 pointsr/gamedesign

Nice rundown. Here are some other books I would recommend OP check out:

u/tblaich · 3 pointsr/truegaming

Finally home and having a chance to reply. I pulled five books off of my shelf that I would recommend, but there are doubtless more that you should read.

Raph Koster's Theory of Fun for Game Design

Janet H. Murray's Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace

Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan's First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game

Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan's Second Person: Role-Playing and Story in Games and Playable Media

They wrote a Third Person as well, I just haven't gotten the chance to read it yet. You might be able to find PDF copies online somewhere, but if you have the money, you should try to support the writer's by buying. Show them that people are interested in critical discourse about games.

Next week I think I'm going to order a few new texts (after payday), and I'd be happy to let you know what I think once i have them in hand.

u/NoMoreBirds · 3 pointsr/tabletopgamedesign

You should check out Ralph Koster's A Theory of Fun, and Keith Burgun's Clockwork Game Design.

Those were the "eye openers" for me.

u/Goliathvv · 3 pointsr/DestinyTheGame

From Theory of Fun for Game Design by Ralph Koster:

> Human beings are all about progress. We like life to be easier. We’re lazy that way. We like to find ways to avoid work. We like to find ways to keep from doing something over and over. We dislike tedium, sure, but the fact is that we crave predictability. Our whole life is built on it. Unpredictable things are stuff like drive-by shootings, lightning bolts that fry us, smallpox, food poisoning—unpredictable things can kill us! We tend to avoid them. We instead prefer sensible shoes, pasteurized milk, vaccines, lightning rods, and laws. These things aren’t perfect, but they do significantly reduce the odds of unpredictable things happening to us.
>
> And since we dislike tedium, we’ll allow unpredictability, but only inside the confines of predictable boxes, like games or TV shows. Unpredictability means new patterns to learn, therefore unpredictability is fun. So we like it, for enjoyment (and therefore, for learning). But the stakes are too high for us to want that sort of unpredictability under normal circumstances. That’s what games are for in the first place—to package up the unpredictable and the learning experience into a space and time where there is no risk.
>
> The natural instinct of a game player is to make the game more predictable because then they are more likely to win.
>
> This leads to behaviors like “bottom-feeding,” where a player will intentionally take on weaker opponents under the sensible logic that a bunch of sure wins is a better strategy than gambling it all on an iffy winner-take-all battle. Players running an easy level two hundred times to build up enough lives so that they can cruise through the rest of the game with little risk is the equivalent of stockpiling food for winter: it’s just the smart thing to do.
>
> This is what games are for. They teach us things so that we can minimize risk and know what choices to make. Phrased another way, the destiny of games is to become boring, not to be fun. Those of us who want games to be fun are fighting a losing battle against the human brain because fun is a process and routine is its destination.
>
> So players often intentionally suck the fun out of a game in hopes they can learn something new (in other words, find something fun) once they complete the task. They’ll do it because they perceive it (correctly) as the optimal strategy for getting ahead. They’ll do it because they see others doing it, and it’s outright unnatural for a human being to see another human being succeeding at something and not want to compete.
>
> All of this happens because the human mind is goal driven. We make pious statements like “it’s the journey, not the destination,” but that’s mostly wishful thinking. The rainbow is pretty and all, and we may well enjoy gazing at it, but while you were gazing, lost in a reverie, someone else went and dug up the pot of gold at the end of it.
>
> Rewards are one of the key components of a successful game activity; if there isn’t a quantifiable advantage to doing something, the brain will often discard it out of hand.(...)

u/thegreatcollapse · 3 pointsr/gamedev

The suggestions from /u/random (wow that username!) are both great books and you should also check out Ralph Koster's A Theory of Fun for Game Design. Though not specific to game design, you might also be interested in Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience

u/adrixshadow · 3 pointsr/gamedesign
u/-t-o-n-y- · 2 pointsr/userexperience

If she's interacting with a lot of users I would suggest reading Practical Empathy. Observing the User Experience is another great resource for learning about user research. User experience is all about people so it's always a good idea to read up on human behavior, psychology, cognition, perception, learning and memory etc. e.g. books like Hooked, Bottlenecks, Design for the mind, Designing with the mind in mind, 100 things every designer needs to know about people, 100 more things every designer needs to know about people, Thinking fast and slow, Predictably Irrational and I would also recommend Articulating design decisions and Friction.

u/chromarush · 2 pointsr/userexperience

I am self taught and design applications for human and system workflows at a Internet security company. I am biased but I don't think a degree will necessarily give you more hands on skills than just finding projects and building a portfolio to show your skills. There are many many different niche categories, every UX professional I have met have different skill sets. For example I tend in a version of lean UX which includes need finding, requirements validation, user testing, workflow analysis, system design, prototyping, analytics, and accessibility design (not in that order). I am interlocked with the engineering team so my job is FAR different than many UX professionals I know who work with marketing teams. They tend to specialize very deeply in research, prototyping, user testing, and analytics. Some UX types code and some use prototyping tools like Balsamiq, UXpin, Adobe etc. There is heavy debate on which path is more useful/safe/ relevant. Where I work I do not get time to code because my team and I feel I provide the best value to our engineering team and internal/external customers by doing the items listed above. The other UX person I will work with me on similar activities but then may be given projects to look at the best options for reusable components and code them up for testing.

TLDR:

u/acousticGiraffe · 2 pointsr/UI_Design

Hmm, off the top of my head...

u/mandix · 2 pointsr/webdesign

I have been learning UI/UX all summer.

u/_Turul_ · 2 pointsr/graphic_design

This PDF will give you a pretty basic understanding of print design, and creating a portfolio, and it's free!
http://www.portfoliohandbook.com/PortfolioHandbook_UCID12.pdf


i've grabbed a stack off my shelf, i'll list a few here

[Thinking with type] (http://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Type-2nd-revised-expanded/dp/1568989695) (Typography)

[Layout Workbook] (http://www.amazon.com/Layout-Workbook-Real-World-Building-Graphic/dp/1592533523/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1374116370&sr=1-1&keywords=layout+workbook+a+real-world+guide+to+building+pages+in+graphic+design) (Typography & Page Layouts)

[Production for Graphic Designers] (http://www.amazon.com/Layout-Workbook-Real-World-Building-Graphic/dp/1592533523/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1374116370&sr=1-1&keywords=layout+workbook+a+real-world+guide+to+building+pages+in+graphic+design)
(This one is more technical, Printing, Final Art Production, Etc.)

[Designing with Type] (http://www.amazon.com/Designing-Type-5th-Essential-Typography/dp/0823014134/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1374116474&sr=1-1&keywords=designing+with+type) (Typography)

[Type & Image] (http://www.amazon.com/Type-Image-Language-Graphic-Design/dp/0471284920/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1374116510&sr=1-1&keywords=type+and+image) (Combining Typography & Imagery)

[Color & Type for the Screen] (http://www.amazon.com/Color-Type-Screen-CD-ROM-Digital/dp/2880463297/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1374116649&sr=1-1&keywords=color+and+type+for+the+screen) (Web Typography)

[The Element of User Experience] (http://www.amazon.com/Elements-User-Experience-User-Centered-Design/dp/0321683684/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1374116686&sr=1-1&keywords=elements+of+user+experience+by+jesse+garrett) (User Experience/Web Design)

[Don't Make Me Think] (http://www.amazon.com/Dont-Make-Me-Think-Usability/dp/0321344758/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1374116719&sr=1-1&keywords=dont+make+me+think) (User Experience/Web Design)

There are also a ton of threads here on Reddit about Design books alone, and there is still the rest of the internet!
These are most of the books I got from my first two years at well respected design program, some are more helpful than others. But it doesn't hurt to read!

Also if you really want to give this a shot, work your ass off! Know that there is someone out there that is willing to (and probably is) working harder at it than you! Design is just like any other field of business, you gotta put in the work to get what you want.

u/Axana · 2 pointsr/Retconned

The article linked at the bottom of the post was used as a launching point for an entire non-fiction book called The Shallows (not related to the upcoming movie). It's same author.

I strongly recommend reading it. Or at least read the full article if you can't get the book.

u/IBuildBusinesses · 2 pointsr/Futurology

You might want to check out the quite excellent book The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brians.

It's written well, and well researched with a lot of supporting references to the underlying studies that have been done. Some of it creeped me out a bit and actually got me off the computer a bit more and out into nature more.

Edit: fixed incorrect formatting code

u/mgunay95 · 2 pointsr/learnprogramming

This isn't necessarily related to computer science- but it's a book about the effect computers, and technology in general have had over humanity. It's called The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. Super interesting read, gives a lot of cool perspective.

https://www.amazon.com/Shallows-What-Internet-Doing-Brains/dp/0393339750/ref=zg_bs_3508_19?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=72HMTJQ0YSB5JCKGP45W

u/raveofthrones · 2 pointsr/Mydaily3

Raveofthrones to-do list for 08/04/2014:

u/BallerGuitarer · 2 pointsr/GetMotivated

There's a book called The Shallows that goes into how spending excessive amounts of time on the internet actually rewires our brain in the same way doing anything for long periods of time does (such as practicing a musical instrument), except this rewiring causes us to lose our ability to focus and maintain our attention span for long periods of time.

While I didn't quit social media entirely, it did make me be more cognizant of the amount of time I spend on social media and reddit. In fact, I think I hardly go on Facebook anymore, and I don't mindlessly click through links on reddit anymore.

Great book, I highly recommend it.

u/Shogil · 2 pointsr/DecidingToBeBetter

I've spent a lot of time today seeking information about dopamine and its active role in motivation and reward seeking behaviors.

Not specifically about procrastination but this book talks how the medium can sometimes be as important as the message that it carries, and how thrill-seeking characters can end up seeking the "high" of novelty through internet (we already see this with people who use pornography instead of building social skills and their appearance to find girls, people who play video games for either cope with stress or to reminisce their childhood years.

It's different for everybody but moderation won't harm. But I'm talking about actual moderation. Don't become like the smoker who says "I can quit whenever I want" and keeps smoking uncontrollably.

As for dopamine and its role 1 and 2 (ctrl-F 'dopamine' on that).

u/KashEsq · 2 pointsr/Unexpected

You're absolutely right. The phenomenon is covered well in Nicholas Carr's The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

u/Schadenfreuder · 2 pointsr/GetMotivated

"Patience is a muscle" is a great metaphor, but what you're really doing is rewiring your brain. Your brain is very malleable and it can be retrained via repeated effort.

I highly recommend Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength and The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains if you want to learn more about the science of it.

u/humble_braggart · 2 pointsr/AskReddit

The Shallows by Nicholas Carr explores this idea. It's a pretty good read.

u/FarBlueShore · 2 pointsr/getdisciplined

Same boat, man; my eyes tend to skip around paragraphs and sentences trying to get the 'gist' of something, not like real reading.

If it's not too weird to recommend a book to someone having trouble with reading - I'd really recommend The Shallows; What The Internet Is Doing To Our Brains. There are audio versions of it, if that helps!

It really put into perspective how your daily habits influence the way your mind works, and vice versa. Really interesting, 100% recommend.

u/Secreteus · 2 pointsr/nosurf

Reading books of course, it will greatly improve your ability to focus which has been really harmed by internet surfing. You may also work on improving some marketable skills, like programming, graphics design, etc., whatever you choose. To dive more into those topics I recommend you to read Cal Newport's books, especially Deep Work and Digital Minimalism, he also has interesting blog: calnewport.com/blog, old posts touch this topic in more depth. Another book that I would like to recommend you is The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains which will show you how damaging internet can be.

u/com4 · 2 pointsr/selfhelp

Well, to paraphrase this book, the way the internet (and tv. think cnn with all those news tickers) deliver information to our brains creates new neural pathways that become accustom to so much information and input bombarding us at once. It's easy to get distracted reading a Wikipedia article and click a link to a related (or unrelated) topic.

Did it make you stupid? No.

How do you learn to think again? Practice. Force yourself to concentrate and soon it will become more automatic. I find it easier to force myself with an actual book of some length (ie, not the internet). Pick something that will hold your interest for awhile. It won't work if the book is too heavy or boring. A bunch of people have enjoyed The Game of Thrones series. Maybe you could give those a spin.

u/Ethnographic · 2 pointsr/userexperience

Suggestions to learn and develop your usability testing and UX research skills:

  • Coursera has an HCI course that is probably worth checking out.

  • See if you can find any local UXPA or relevant Meetup.com meetings. Network, ask for informational interviews, see if you can shadow, etc. Hopefully people are doing presentations or doing round tables you can learn from. Maybe you can find someone you can pay to mentor you? The national UXPA conference is May 31st in Seattle, probably a good place to go.

  • Steve Portigal has a great book. He also has a great podcast interviewing researchers leads. Called dollars to donuts or something. You can probably learn a lot about building a team there.

  • This is another classic

  • The Norman Nielsen Group has a ton of great resources on their site

    That should get you started.
u/EntirelyDelicious · 2 pointsr/learnprogramming

I had an intro course in interaction design at my college, and we used This Book

Not sure if that is helpful or not.

As for programming, as far as I learned in my introduction course, rapid prototyping is much more important than deep programming knowledge.

The ability to make a quick mock-up seems to be what you are looking for, so something web-based, that'll allow you to edit templates on a code level may be useful

u/ajkandy · 2 pointsr/userexperience

All excellent methodology. I would add, if you need some "book" resources:

u/cheeseballtaco · 2 pointsr/web_design

I think that there are many ways of learning UX. What I have found that I use most often is googling something like "Modern web design UX" and I try and recreate those myself and so my brain just knows what to do. Here are some cool books I have read that I found very useful.
https://www.amazon.com/Things-Designer-People-Voices-Matter/dp/0321767535/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1509069574&sr=1-1&keywords=100+Things+Every+Designer+Needs+to+Know+About+People%E2%80%8A%E2%80%94%E2%80%8A+Susan+Weinschenk

and

https://www.amazon.com/About-Face-Essentials-Interaction-Design/dp/1118766571/ref=pd_lpo_sbs_14_img_0?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=T2H4X09K5XV9Y2HPT56N

good luck friend

u/Mcgruff · 2 pointsr/videos
u/SebastianVanCartier · 2 pointsr/askgaybros

You could try it, say for a month, and see how you get on. It doesn't have to be forever.

It seems, from reading between the lines of what you've written, that you're finding social media is a) absorbing a lot of your time; b) making you feel fearful and sad, and; c) actually contributing towards your feelings of isolation anyway. Those are great reasons to take a step back, at the very least.

I think if you really want it to work you need to find ways of occupying your time in the hours that you would otherwise have spent on the socials. Get out and do stuff. It doesn't matter if you end up not liking the stuff. It doesn't matter if you don't like all the people you meet. Just try things. Eat lunch at a cafe, hit the gym, volunteer for a charity, go running, join a class, crochet blankets for orphans... whatever you like.

I don't use social media at all (except LinkedIn) but my reasons for deleting my profiles were more to do with disliking the business models at work within most of the big tech firms. Have you read Jaron Lanier's book? It's an interesting perspective and might give you other reasons to consider whether social media use is right for you longer term.

u/The_God_of_Abraham · 2 pointsr/Showerthoughts

There's a decent and growing amount. Go to Google Scholar and search for "social media emotions" or "social media engagement". With a basic understanding of the major business models, it's not hard to connect the dots.

People like Jaron Lanier also write entire books about it.

u/AOrtega1 · 2 pointsr/politics

Main thesis of this book: https://www.amazon.com/Arguments-Deleting-Social-Media-Accounts/dp/125019668X

(His animal analogies are ass though).

u/vlzetko · 2 pointsr/nosurf

My suggestion is to not give a f#$k on what others say regarding such decisions.

It's something you will need to get used to!

Regarding your mother, I believe that you should buy her this book:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/125019668X/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i0

u/ActiveCarpet · 2 pointsr/ludology

This video examines the history of creativity in game design, the evolution of genres, and how game designers can be creative in the future. It combines Raph Koster's GDC talk about practical creativity, with insights from books as varied as Tynan Sylvesters designing games, to Micheal Sellers Advanced game design, to suggest that the key to the future of creativity in video games is understanding our past.

​

Raph Kosters GDC talk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zyVTxGpEO30

Tynan Sylvester's Designing games https://www.amazon.ca/Designing-Games-Guide-Engineering-Experiences/dp/1449337937

Erin Hofmman's Gdc Talk Precision of Emotion https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FP-LNRtwpb8

Gdc talk Design in Detail https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJhpMmVLMZQ

​

There are About 25 other links in the description of the video as well, all pertaining to the history and future of game design

u/Kinrany · 2 pointsr/MUD

I'll hop on the game design book recommendation bandwagon and suggest Designing Games. It's less popular, but much more useful IMO.

u/TexturelessIdea · 2 pointsr/gamedev

If you want to know how to deal with all the negative comments people give you, the only real answer is to ignore them. If you want to know how to convince people that being a indie dev is a worthwhile pursuit, then you have to release a game that sells really well.

This may sound like very useless advice, but the truth is that getting into indie game development is not a good idea. Most likely you will never finish a game, or you will release a game that nobody cares about and doesn't make you much(if any) money. Some people spend years making a game, and still end up releasing a bad game. The simple truth is that no amount of hard work, dedication, or love of game development is going to guarantee your success.

Most aspiring gamedevs like to talk about Minecraft, Stardew Valley, or Dwarf Fortress, as if the existence of those games guarantees their success. Most people don't realize that for every Notch, there are 1,000 people who make games nobody even knows about. Most likely you, me, and most of the other people here will fail to make a game that earns enough money to live off.

If you can't afford to release a game or two (or 5) without turning a profit, then game development just isn't for you. If my post upsets you, keep in mind that you will hear much worse from loads of people no matter how good your game is. I would never recommend developing indie game to anybody as a career choice, it is very hard work that will most likely earn you less money than working part time at minimum wage. You should think of game development as a fun hobby; because, until you make a big hit, game development isn't a career any more than buying lottery tickets.

If you've made it to the end of my post and you still want to be a game developer, well that's the kind of attitude you're going to need, so you have that going for you. I do also have some practical advice for improving your gamedev skills. When you're talking about your knowledge of programming, you seem hung up on the language itself. Knowing a programming language makes you about as much of a programmer as knowing a human language makes you a writer. I'm not saying this to be mean (you may find that hard to believe at this point); I'm just trying to point out that there are other aspects of programming for you to learn. Some good things to read up on are programming(or design) patterns, algorithm design, and general (language agnostic) programming topics. There are also game design topics that don't relate to the programming aspects. I'll leave a quick list of resources below.

Project Euler

Theory of Fun for Game Design

Game Programming Patterns

Coursera's Software Development Category

MIT Open CourseWare Computer Science Category

u/raydenuni · 2 pointsr/boardgames

> I also like these discussions! This is actually a subject of some interest to me, because people have been complaining about a lack of board game content as true critique rather than just more "consumer oriented" reviews.

If you're interested in the theory of games (not to be confused with game theory, which is an interesting type of math), then look into "ludology".

> Have you played My First Orchard?

I've never heard of it. But it sounds like you make choices and can get better at the game, much like tic-tac-toe, so I would call it a game. Interestingly enough, from a mathematical, complexity tree point of view, tic-tac-toe, checkers, and chess are also essentially equivalent. Some are more complex than others, but at the end of the day there's a branching tree of moves, you take turns moving through this tree, and at the end of some branches, a player wins. We consider tic-tac-toe to be trivial and not worth our time because our brains are able to solve it. But checkers and chess are just as theoretically solvable, we're just not smart enough.

> What about a game where you roll 100d6 and your opponent rolls 100d6.

I guess. I'm a fan of extreme examples proving stuff. It's an easy way to see if your theory holds up or not. I'd argue that's a pretty poor game, but it's not technically any different than any number of games. Take MTG for example, given a specific shuffle of each player's deck, you could say one person has a 100% chance to win. For most shuffles though, it's probably a lot closer to 50%. In those cases, your choices matter.

> Also, as for a game needing "goals," doesn't this eliminate many "sandbox" style games (whether video games or sandboxy narrative games like RPGs)?

It does. Sandbox style games are often considered toys and not games. Sim City has been famously described by Will Wright as a toy and not a game. If you're looking at the dressing instead of the content, a lot of not-games become games. Toys are fine. Toys are good. Nothing wrong with toys. There are a lot of cool toys where you learn a lot of really useful stuff and given self-imposed goals, you can learn stuff about them and reality. But they're not games.

> Also, I'm not sure if I agree that activities that aren't about learning are not fun? Can't something be fun because it's physical (e.g., thrill rides)? Because it's nostalgic?

This is potentially a weakness of the argument and might be enough to prove my radical stance false. But the idea is that all of those things involve learning of some sort. It starts to blur the lines between learning and experiencing new things though for sure.

> Finally, is there nothing to say about the fact that S&L is routinely referred to as a game?

There is. And words are used differently in different contexts, with different people, to mean different things. If we're just speaking colloquially, then yeah, anything on the same shelf at Target can be considered a game. But if we're using these terms to actually mean something so we can have an intellectual, academic discussion about games, it's useful to differentiate between toys and competitions and games. If our terminology can't distinguish between Chess and Lego in some definitive manner, we're going to have trouble coming up with any interesting conclusions. I don't mean to assign any quality to the term game, there are a lot of really great non-games out there. We already differentiate between different types of board games. People will often refer to something as multi-player solitaire. Could we not refer to these as competitions? And of course when speaking colloquially, it doesn't really do to categorize Dominion as a card based competition instead of a card-game.

Raph Koster's blog has a bunch of good content: https://www.raphkoster.com/ But I would start with his book A Theory of Fun. Apparently there are some PDFs here and here, 10 years later. It's a super easy to ready book, but really insightful. I highly recommend it. It looks like maybe the PDFs are a subset of the book. Let me know what you think.

u/MyJimmies · 2 pointsr/truegaming

It's been on my mind again, so I'm happy to see it here on Truegaming. But there's this video that might help out a bit or at least be a bit entertaininly-interesting.

It might be awhile until we are at the point where we can have entire schools based around this kind of discussion. But hopefully someday. There's plenty of interesting books outthere that have already been suggested here. There's some books based around game design like Raph Koster's "A Theory of Fun". There're YouTubers like aforementioned MrBTongue and Satchbag that fondly talks about games or themes in games and how it affects them and those around them. Then there's /r/truegaming that talks about these things as well, albeit a bit more fanatically.

But sadly I got nothing to fit exactly your category that you want to see, though I'd love to see it myself. Perhaps a start for finding some stories of interesting user interactions in MMOs can start with Eve Online. Check out The Mittani. Although I haven't read it in a long while I do remember its launch when I still flew with Goonswarm/Goonwaffe and the cool pilots and writers of the site. Some great stories and unintentionally interesting insight into the mindset of players interacting in an MMO space.

u/dindenver · 2 pointsr/RPGdesign

Thanks for sharing!

These are resources that helped me better understand game design:

This is about the gamificaiton of non-game designs. But it really expounds on what makes it a game as opposed to other activities (play or work for instance):
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/video/9-5-theses-on-the-power-and-efficacy-of-gamification/

RPG Design Patterns:
http://rpg-design-patterns.notimetoplay.org/

The Theory of Fun for Game Design book:
https://smile.amazon.com/Theory-Game-Design-Raph-Koster/dp/1449363210/ref=sr_1_1

u/SharpSides · 2 pointsr/pcmasterrace

Our very own E-Book HERE has a lot of helpful stuff on getting started!

I'd also recommend the following:

http://www.amazon.com/Art-Game-Design-book-lenses/dp/0123694965/

http://www.amazon.com/Theory-Game-Design-Raph-Koster/dp/1449363210/

u/jseego · 2 pointsr/Parenting

Well, it's true that any well-designed game does that. Here is a wonderful book on that and other topics from the world of game design.

I guess the question is whether it's exploited or not.

And a further question is: should we consider it exploitation if the goal is just to keep the user playing the game for long periods of time? I think the answer to this is yes, but you may not, and that's okay.

It sounds like neither of us are okay letting our kids play unlimited amounts of video games with no supervision, so we're both doing the right thing.

u/Chowderman · 2 pointsr/gamedesign

I agree with others that you should just start trying to make games, even if they're clones of other games to get you started. Stay small. Smaller than you think you can handle even. Don't make your first game your massive 100 hour JRPG epic.

​

A great book is A Theory of Fun, also. Good luck! And don't get discouraged when it gets tough!

u/enalios · 2 pointsr/gamedesign

If you want to be a game designer, just first accept that you're training for a marathon not a sprint.

Start with small exercises, not a full game just, like, quick sketches of game mechanics or ideas.

Do lots of tutorials, like "how to make a shmup in [whatever game engine]" and then when you finish the tutorial just add one or two things to make it your own, then move on to another tutorial.

After a few of those, start participating in 48 hour game jams.

There's a site I participated in for a bit called 1 Game a Month in which the idea was simply to finish one game a month. Not a masterpiece every month, just something finished every month.

It really is worth it to invest time in learning how to actually finish a project as opposed to always thinking about finishing it.

I recommend reading the following short articles:

The Chemistry of Game Design

Understanding Challenge

And I recommend the following books, not necessarily to read cover to cover but to read until the content doesn't seem to interest you, then just kinda skip around to the interesting bits:

Challenges for Game Designers by Brenda Braithwaite

The Art of Game Design by Jesse Schell

And finally I recommend reading this book from cover to cover:

A Theory of Fun by Raph Koster

u/1337speaker · 2 pointsr/Poetry

I started reading Eli Pariser - The Filter Bubble before work this morning and was inspired to write this poem. The main theme is internet addiction and how our lives are becoming disconnected and close-minded even though our access to communication and information is so abundant.

u/Fawky42 · 2 pointsr/steroids

I just saw this book recommended. It looks very interesting. I have to find a way to solve my problem...

u/toksinmafs · 2 pointsr/askpsychology

You were probably able to focus better in some subtle ways reading a hard copy, but since text is text, and meaning is meaning, in the end the responsibility to focus or not focus is on you, on the individual.

Maybe you'd be interested in this. I've read it, and it's pretty good in my opinion, if a few years old now. http://www.amazon.com/The-Shallows-Internet-Doing-Brains-ebook/dp/B003R7L90I

u/Switche · 2 pointsr/AskReddit

Silence on the Wire is a set of very interesting lateral/passive attack scenarios in information security. It's not a how-to or "field guide," however; consider it more of a series of theoretical scenarios good for insights and perspective, to help understand and begin to think about the many ways in which a simple tool, mechanism, or a common practice can be exploited for other uses. Some of these scenarios are far-fetched, and others are already out-dated, but that's not the strength of the book.

One great part about this book is that it does not require much knowledge on any of the topics covered, whether technical or otherwise. Zalewski gives an adequate primer on just about everything you need to know in order to understand the basics of what's going on.

It's not light reading by any means, though. This is a great book if you want to wrap your mind around some very cleverly designed scenarios.

u/TheAethereal · 2 pointsr/hacking

Silence on the Wire. Not a whole lot of practical information, but it gives amazing insight into the proper mindset.

u/ericzhill · 2 pointsr/java

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.

u/anomalya · 2 pointsr/Design

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.)

u/Concise_AMA_Bot · 1 pointr/ConciseIAmA
u/nabbit · 1 pointr/computerforensics

It's a bit old, but Silence on the Wire is a great read about indirect attacks such as keyboard monitoring (amongst many others)

u/guidanceSeeker · 1 pointr/megalinks

No offense, but just wait for 5 or 10 years and you'll see !

The porn industry know very well how the human brain works, and they use it against us. There are a lot of book dealing with this issue, you can check them out if you want :

u/vaderprime · 1 pointr/userexperience

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.
u/codekiller · 1 pointr/programming

I have in the past used GUI Bloopers as an entertaining guideline.

u/shrubberni · 1 pointr/design_critiques

Previous version was better than these.

Among other things, you have some confusing gestalt issues here. The name blends in with the dark roads due to color, shape, and proximity. The result is confusing and jumbled.

You might want to read "Designing with the Mind in Mind" by Jeff Johnson (among others) for some good tips on visual processing.

u/two_in_the_bush · 1 pointr/atheism

Sigh, I'd love to sit and explain how small hurdles add up, how extra delays and steps have more impact than they appear, and how there are frequent exceptions to assumptions like those you've made, but I don't think it's productive use of our time (either for me to create it or for you to read it). There are some great books on the subject if you ever get the inclination.

u/andreplaut · 1 pointr/learndesign

I would recommend starting with Elements of User Experience. It'll give you a great overview of UX design.

Then, to go into even more detail, I'd recommend About Face: The Essentials of Interaction Design. It's much more practical and detailed.

Those were two of the books we used when we built the [User Experience Design Immersive program at General Assembly] (https://generalassemb.ly/education/user-experience-design-immersive)

u/AgentXTree · 1 pointr/web_design

I was just about to recommend the same. To append more to your comment, OP can start with their playlist on UX design.

I would also recommend:

u/KO__ · 1 pointr/getdisciplined

Hey, thanks for your insight. Just to make sure, is it this the book you were referring to? https://www.amazon.com/Shallows-What-Internet-Doing-Brains/dp/0393339750.

u/we_are_the_lucky_one · 1 pointr/NoFap

Been reading a book right now that talks about all of this - you guys should check it out (because we should all ALWAYS be reading something during our transformation :) )

https://www.amazon.com/Shallows-What-Internet-Doing-Brains/dp/0393339750

u/sweetyi · 1 pointr/gaming

ALL technology? As in you're not even allowed to listen to music? Because that's what I'd recommend if you can get away with it; a lot of people listen to music while they do other things but very few people sit down and relax and focus on listening to their favorite music without multitasking, it's a great way to pass time.

Failing that, taking up drawing or writing are economical options considering you're tight on cash. A loaner guitar or cheapo from a pawn shop could be healthy hobbies, but they're tough to learn without your computer to access resources.

You said you don't like reading but I'd suggest you try to learn to love it, because it's going to be one of the cheapest and most fulfilling ways to pass time given your constraints. I think as you spend time away from technology you'll find reading more enjoyable as your mind recovers some of it's ability to focus. Just going out on a limb here (and projecting a bit), but do you often feel unable to focus on tasks like reading long passages or say sitting back to watch a movie without interruption? I know at least one author who's written a book suggesting that the way we're presented with rapid-fire and incredibly diverse information/entertainment on the internet has left our ability for deep focus impaired, while our ability to multi-task has improved.

Another option that occurred to me mid-post is that you might try to find some cheap model airplane kits or something like that, they're quite time consuming if you can be meticulous.

u/muchADEW · 1 pointr/Bad_Cop_No_Donut

It's funny, I remember having conversation in my journalism classes about how freeing it would be to present content online, because we would have no limits on length. We never once considered that people wouldn't have the attention spans to absorb that extra content. Now, here we are 20 years later, and longform journalism is struggling.

(An aside: If you're interested in that notion of how the Internet is shortening our attention spans, check out The Shallows by Nick Carr).

u/antiprism · 1 pointr/ADHD

I think this is something that a lot of people, not just those with ADHD, are dealing with. I really believe that the 24/7 use of phones with their constant notifications plus the constant mindless browsing of news, social media feeds, entertainment sites are sapping people's attention spans and ability to focus. It conditions our brains to crave excessive stimulation and when we don't get it (such as during a 2 hour art film), we get bored and can't focus even if we enjoy what we're doing on some level. It's even worse for delayed gratification tasks like studying which can be boring in the moment but pays off at some later time.

I've been meaning to read The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains to get a better understanding of how this all works. But the book was published in 2011 and even in the 6 years since, the way we use our devices has changed a lot.

Perhaps it's best if we really cut out a lot of the mindless browsing and view out "screen diet" similar to how we view nutrition. Reddit, Twitter, clickbait news are all "junk" which are fine in moderation but can mess up our ability to focus on stuff that matters. Or even our ability to enjoy fun stuff like movies or books.

There's also the fact that internet companies want you to have a short attention span. It makes them money. Whether it's ad revenue or impulse buys, more eyes constantly browsing their sites means more money for them. And a shot attention span for the rest of us.

u/[deleted] · 1 pointr/politics

Don't look now, but the internet is likely destroying out ability to learn and think critically way worse than any standardized test.

Though that might be considered heresy on place like reddit...

u/affalo · 1 pointr/AquamarinesBarracks

good luck with the video games. I suggest reading The Shallows it details what the internet does to the neuro-plasticity of the brain. Super enlightening read!

u/Jyggalag · 1 pointr/DoesAnybodyElse

It happens to me a lot. I tend to just remember the highlights.

The book "The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains" [0] has a lot of insight into this process. Quick, easy access to lots of information doesn't always lend itself to retention.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Shallows-What-Internet-Doing-Brains/dp/0393339750

u/rpgedgar · 1 pointr/mentalhealth

It could be due to how the internet age is changing our brains. No longer do we need to rely on memory as much when we can do a search and be ninja-like in our fact finding. The brain is like any other muscle, and when you don't use certain parts, they grow weaker. I work an accounting job and I make sure to do memory exercises because I started noticing the same thing.

https://www.amazon.com/Shallows-What-Internet-Doing-Brains/dp/0393339750

And of course, always check with a doctor to make sure nothing's structurally changed in your brain.

u/Saltflakez · 1 pointr/learnprogramming

That's a problem with the definition of "intelligence" and not with whether our "brain abilities" have biological limitations or not.

What we should be discussing is how easy people blame their genes for their shortcomings before they first rule out other potential problems, such as short attention span due to bad habits or impatience due to upbringing because yes, turns out if you condition yourself to scroll Reddit for funny pictures and cats you will eventually find anything else that doesn't give you that rush boring and will blame yourself for lacking in the attention span department. A great book that talks about that is The shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains.

You reminded me of a coworker I had who kept insisting that I should do an IQ test and I told him that it doesn't fucking matter how much I score because at the end of the day here I am getting paid for peanuts to fix computers. Like, if I scored high I would just get more depressed and if I scored low I would feel lucky for even having this job. I'm more of the type of person who judges himself from his actions, not "potential".

And to be honest, you don't even need to be gifted to work and sustain yourself in the long run in any profession unless you really care about procuring exceptionally great results such as winning the gold medal in the Olympics.

u/Coffeeverse · 1 pointr/AskWomen

The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains by Nicolas Carr

Fascinating! And scary as hell. It has helped me to start cleaning up my mental hygiene habits in regards to screen time and helped me re-appreciate extended quiet concentration time.

u/JonnYellowSnow · 1 pointr/StopGaming

There are not enough research papers specifically on gaming addiction because gaming addiction together with social media and pornography falls under the umbrella of internet addiction - Like you said a rather new field. Some breakthroughs are being made in the last years to have it recognized as an addiction per se (at least in Europe) the problem with conducting enough research is that there are no funds and insurance companies have no wish having another area of responsibility to potentially give away money to people suffering from it. If gaming addiction become completely recognized by international bodies of medicine then insurance companies might have to pay preexisting clients for passed and current treatments ---> something they definitely do not want to do.
Nonetheless here are some videos of legit men of science (not some random ex gamer) that research the field.

"Here is a short interview with Dr. David Greenfield talking about some of the mental and physical applications of gaming and internet addiction"


There are also longer talks on his channel like this one.
Dr. Greenfield has been researching Internet addiction since the 90's.


"Dr. Klaus Woelfling, from the University of Mainz. Germany is taking steps in treating Internet addiction and especially gaming addiction" - this one is a difficult watch primarily because the speaker is very uncharismatic (try watching with the speed setting on 1.5).

Last but definitely not least is "Your Brain on Porn"
Yes, yes I know, you might not want to hear that another of your favorite pastimes is bad for you, but this video covers on a very scientific basis the damages that watching excessive pornography causes to the brain, and no this is not some kind of NoFap cult propaganda, it speaks only on the subject of internet porn. Like I said before, porn together with gaming fall under the umbrella of internet addiction because the reaction we receive from these negative habits has the same structure. If you actually watch the Your Brain on Porn video you will hear him mention numerous times that the damages caused to dopamine receptors is similar to the ones cause from gaming and extensive internet use.

This is just some of the evidence done by men of medicine and science from the top of my head. If you want to go deeper I'd recommend The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains By Nicholas Carr an American author and Pulitzer Prize winner (for that book), witch contains truly numerous examples of scientific studies and references you might want in the bibliography.


Also The Brain That Changes Itself by Norman Doidge M.D that talks mainly about brain plasticity and how different behaviors and habits cause the brain to form new cells , create new neural pathways etc etc . He also gives lots of examples how positive and negative behaviors causes various changes IN THE BRAIN, Internet addiction stuff included.

If you really want proof and not just searching for a reason to dismiss things you dont like the sound of then I hope this comment will serve you. If you do nothing less at least watch the first interview with Dr. David Greenfield. It is only 6 minutes long.

Hope this post that took me 50 minutes to put together and find all the links, will be of service to somebody.
Peace.

Edit: Grammar and formatting

u/TrendingCommenterBot · 1 pointr/TrendingReddits

/r/nosurf

Our Goal:

To help people stop mindlessly browsing the internet on their smartphones, tablets, and computers.

Why?

The internet is a great tool but it's use is not harmless. Research has shown that use of social media, adult sites, and smart phone apps induces neuroplastic changes in the brain. The resulting changes can cause problems with focus, attention span, and memory.

Welcome to our corner and feel free to share your experience, opinion or tip about how to control your internet usage instead of being controlled!

Start Here

u/DrDraek · 1 pointr/TrueAtheism
u/grrrrreat · 1 pointr/4chan4trump

139557749| > United States Anonymous (ID: EwRHxNzN)

>>139557219
>internet is cocaine
You're not the first person to have thought of this.
https://www.amazon.com/Shallows-What-Internet-Doing-Brains/dp/0393339750

u/aknalid · 1 pointr/startups

Well, it is a fact that we can process information much faster by reading. Although, on the internet, we don't really "read" per se. We skim articles and look for key sections. Nicholas Carr thinks that's a bad idea.

With that said, I think the attention span is higher for older demographics than younger ones. This is partly why things like Snapchat, Vine etc.. is much more popular among the younger crowd. The beauty of the internet is that, it really doesn't matter what medium you use to create content -- as long as it's high quality, it will eventually find an audience.

I would also be interested in seeing some data on media consumption preferences.

u/letthisbeanewstart · 1 pointr/gaming

You might want to read this book then:

The Shallows

Gives you an insight as to how the web has changed the way your brain works, reduced your attention span and makes it so much more difficult to focus on longer tasks (e.g. finishing a game).

u/masbate · 1 pointr/india

Someone had written a book about this.

Here is it's review.


http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/06/books/review/Lehrer-t.html?_r=0

And the book itself.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Shallows-Internet-Doing-Brains/dp/0393339750


Some research points out that human brains have not evolved fast enough for the transition between regular books in physical form to the electronic text format.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/reading-paper-screens/


And internet encourages us to multi task, which is not how our brains are designed.

All these factors contribute to the decline in concentration and comprehension.

Mindfulness meditation is supposed to remedy this situation, of only we could get off FB and reddit for 20 min a day.

u/ryryryryryry_ · 1 pointr/UXResearch

Pretty much anything from https://rosenfeldmedia.com/ will get you started. TBH the methodologies for formative research are going to be very similar to what your used to in anthropology. What will come in handy is reading up on usability testing.

A Practical Guide to Usability Testing
https://www.amazon.com/Practical-Guide-Usability-Testing/dp/1841500208

Handbook of Usability Testing: How to Plan, Design, and Conduct Effective Tests
https://www.amazon.com/Handbook-Usability-Testing-Conduct-Effective/dp/0470185481/ref=pd_lpo_sbs_14_img_0?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=MHNVG7XHCDRDF3859YRW

u/chromaticburst · 1 pointr/cogsci

The Psychology of Human-Computer Interaction? Thanks. It's interesting to see that even Jef Raskin has left a review. I think I will pick up a copy.

u/mantra · 1 pointr/userexperience

Strictly you don't need a full-on degree IMO.

A good starting point is Tim Oren's User Interface Homilies which is 90% of "the psychology that matters" at a GUI level. If you want to dig deeper you can go to the referenced Card, Moran & Newell's book or other references to GOMS. A lot of this came out of Xerox PARC and the invention of Alto/Star computers.

You'll notice if you think about it that Mac and iOS are pretty heavily based on many of these ideas. Tim Oren worked at Digital Research (creator of CP/M, the "original PC OS" and Gem OS used on the Atari ST) and at Apple.

Then since you discover that UI design is all about enabling users to use your design entirely via their "inner 4-yo", learning something about childhood development can be useful (if you are a US credentialed teacher you already know this part).

Piaget is often the basis of this - GUIs use primarily Sensorimotor Stage skills. Text UIs primarily use Concrete Operational and Formal Operational stages, which is why GUIs are "easier to use" than Text UIs - you don't actually have to consciously think when it's Sensorimotor. That's what makes them intuitive.

Behavior Economics generally isn't taught so much outside of business schools and a handful of economics departments as far as can tell. I had to go to an MBA program that included a behavioral luminary to get much coverage even 15 ya. Honestly academia doesn't do well in this area anyway - not in terms that make it useful for UX as a profession. Honestly you are better off learning economics, marketing/sales, negotiation and a dash of behavior. Read the books in this list. Of this "Persuasion" and "Paradox of Choice" are probably the first to read IMO.

You have the art background so I'd skip that UNLESS you haven't actually done studio art with your own hands. Class != Studio by a very long shot.

u/jtouchs · 1 pointr/IxD

About Face: The Essentials of Interaction Design https://www.amazon.com/dp/1118766571/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_MRH7BbP7V5K81

u/williambotter · 1 pointr/brasilnoticias

Apesar das críticas às redes sociais e inclusive das campanhas midiáticas para abrir mão delas, poucos usuários tomam a decisão de apagar suas contas. O Twitter continua com seus 300 milhões de perfis, o Facebook tem mais de dois bilhões, e o Instagram segue crescendo e já passa dos 500 milhões.

Jaron Lanier, pioneiro da internet e da realidade virtual, considera que os benefícios destas redes não compensam os inconvenientes. E em seu último livro, Ten Arguments For Deleting Your Social Media Accounts (“dez argumentos para apagar as suas contas nas redes sociais”), dá motivos para largar o Twitter, o Facebook e inclusive o WhatsApp e os serviços do Google. Se pudermos. E mesmo que seja só por uma temporada. Estes são alguns dos motivos que ele propõe nesse texto escrito a modo de manifesto amável:

1. Você está perdendo sua liberdade. As redes sociais, em especial o Facebook, pretendem guardar registro de todas as nossas ações: o que compartilhamos, o que comentamos, o que curtimos, aonde vamos. “Agora todos somos animais de laboratório”, escreve Lanier, e participamos de uma experiência constante para que os anunciantes nos enviem suas mensagens quando estivermos mais suscetíveis a elas.

Isto também teve consequências políticas: os grupos que distribuem notícias falsas encontraram uma “interface desenhada para ajudar os anunciantes a alcançarem seu público objetivo com mensagens testadas para conseguir sua atenção”. Para o Facebook tanto faz se estes “anunciantes” são empresas que querem vender produtos, partidos políticos ou difusores de notícias falsas. O sistema é o mesmo para todos, e melhora “quando as pessoas estão irritadas, obcecadas e divididas”.

2. Estão lhe deixando infeliz. Lanier cita estudos que mostram que, apesar das possibilidades de conexão que as redes sociais oferecem, na verdade sofremos “uma sensação cada vez maior de isolamento” por motivos tão díspares como “os padrões irracionais de beleza e status, por exemplo, ou a vulnerabilidade aos trolls”.

Os algoritmos, escreve ele, nos colocam em categorias e nos ordenam segundo nossos amigos, seguidores, o número de curtidas ou retuítes, o muito ou pouco que publicamos… “De repente você e outras pessoas fazem parte de um monte de competições das quais não pediu para participar”. São critérios que nos parecem pouco significativos, mas que acabam tendo efeitos na vida real: “Nas notícias que vemos, em quem nos aparece como possível relacionamento amoroso, em que produtos nos oferecem”. Também podem acabar influenciando em futuros trabalhos: muitos dos responsáveis por recursos humanos procuram seus candidatos no Facebook e no Google.

Quanto aos trolls, Lanier adverte que “todos temos um troll dentro de nós”. No contexto das redes sociais, as opiniões se polarizam, e frequentemente as discussões não são oportunidades para dialogar, e sim para ganhar pontos à custa de expor os outros, numa espécie de antidialética da lacração. Lanier nos pergunta a respeito desse comportamento: “Você é tão amável como gostaria de ser?”.

Jaron Lanier em uma imagem de 2014 Thomas Lohnes / Getty Images

3. Estão enfraquecendo a verdade. Lanier lembra que as teorias da conspiração mais loucas (ele dá o exemplo dos antivacinas) frequentemente começam nas redes sociais, onde seu eco se amplifica, frequentemente com a ajuda de bots e “antes de aparecerem em veículos de comunicação extremamente partidários”. O próprio terraplanismo nasceu a partir de poucos grupos do Facebook, amplificados por um algoritmo que dava repercussão a essas publicações e compartilhavam mais por seu conteúdo disparatado do que por seu verdadeiro alcance.

4. Estão destruindo sua capacidade de empatia. Com esse argumento, Lanier se refere principalmente ao filtro bolha, termo criado por Eli Pariser. No Facebook, por exemplo, as notícias aparecem na tela de acordo com as pessoas e os veículos de comunicação que seguimos e, também, dependendo dos conteúdos de que gostamos. A consequência é que nas redes frequentemente acessamos somente nossa própria bolha, ou seja, tudo aquilo que conhecemos, com o que estamos de acordo e que nos faz sentir confortáveis.

Ou seja, não vemos outras ideias, recebemos somente suas caricaturas. E, consequentemente, em vez de tentar entender as razões por trás de outros pontos de vista, nossas ideias se reforçam e o diálogo é cada vez mais difícil.

5. Não querem que você tenha dignidade econômica. Lanier explica que o modelo de negócio que predomina na Internet é consequência do “dogma” de acreditar que “se o software não era grátis não podia ser aberto”. A publicidade foi vista como uma forma de solucionar esse problema.

Lanier propõe já desde livros anteriores como Who Owns the Future? (“Quem controla o futuro?) que existem outras alternativas, como pagar para usar serviços como o Google e o Facebook. Em troca, poderíamos receber alguma compensação de acordo com nossa contribuição, que pode ser de conteúdos aos dados que hoje damos de graça para que sejam vendidos em pacotes de publicidade.

Essas são somente algumas das razões expostas por Lanier em um livro que, como o próprio autor admite, nem mesmo chega a tocar alguns temas que não o afetam tão diretamente, como “as pressões insustentáveis em pessoas jovens, especialmente mulheres” e como “os algoritmos podem discriminá-lo por racismo e outras razões horríveis”.

Lanier não quer acabar com a Internet. Pelo contrário: deixar as redes, ainda que somente por um tempo, pode ser uma forma de saber como estão nos prejudicando e, principalmente, percebermos o que poderiam nos oferecer.

u/AnnCoultersAdamsAppl · 1 pointr/politics

Didn’t know that was a thing. I won’t use any Facebook property unless I absolutely had to for work.

Lately, I’m siding with Jaron Lanier and stop using reddit, too.

Reddit and YouTube are the only social media services I currently use, and they’re not considered “traditional social media. “

I even quit using lots of other services and apps from Google like Search, Maps, and even Chrome in favor of open source browsers like FireFox, Chromium and pals. They’re all creepy as fuck.

Some hardcore Linux people think that using Chromium is lame because it’s an extension of an endorsement of Google’s negative influence on the web.

u/Poemi · 1 pointr/Showerthoughts

There's no wisdom in cynicism. It might feel good to implicitly set yourself above others by saying everyone (except you) sucks, but it's an illusion.

There's actually a considerable (and rapidly growing) body of academic research that shows that social media really does encourage people to act like assholes.

But don't worry—you can personally fix this problem.

u/JRhapsodus · 1 pointr/gamedesign

Agreed!

I would also recommend a book called Designing Games, A guide to engineering experiences by Tynan Sylvester:

http://www.amazon.com/Designing-Games-Guide-Engineering-Experiences/dp/1449337937

u/Snownova · 1 pointr/gamedev

You mean like this one?
;)

u/slowfly1st · 1 pointr/learnprogramming

Here's a game developer road map:

https://github.com/utilForever/game-developer-roadmap

​

If you want to learn about Game Design, I recommend this book: Designing Games: A Guide to Engineering Experiences (it's by Tynan Sylvester, creator of Rimworld). I'm neither a game developer nor a game designer, but I really enjoyed the book, because it is somewhat the 'science' of game design, it's about mechanics, about emotion, about decisions and so on - things I knew there are, but didn't really understood the impact it has on a game, how those things make a game "good" or "bad".

​

What you can do now:

  • Try to ship a game for android. All the tools are free, I think publishing in the play store is a one time payment of a few dollars. You will learn a lot of programming skills, but also you will understand what it means, to ship something. The awesome thing about the play store is: A lot of potential users.
  • Contribute to open source games ( https://github.com/leereilly/games).
u/Chill84 · 1 pointr/tabletopgamedesign

I had a thread about this not too long ago

From there, I suggest Tynan Sylvester's Engineering Experiences

And I still think Ian Schrieber's [Game Design Concepts series] (https://gamedesignconcepts.wordpress.com/2009/06/29/level-1-overview-what-is-a-game/) is a masterclass

There is a lot of great information out there, and there is also so much chaff to sift through. Of course, Richard Garfield would remind us that we also need to play every game.

>"Game designers should train themselves to think out of the mold, but it's naive to think that you profit by not even knowing what the mold is."
-- Richard Garfield

u/kryptomicron · 1 pointr/gamedev

Read Designing Games by the creator of RimWorld. If you can't afford to buy it, check your library; mine has the eBook.

u/Shadow-Master · 1 pointr/gamedev

Don't be suckered by a "Game Design" program. There are VERY few good ones. Most of them....as in, 99% of them...are rip-offs.

Learn programming, 3D-modeling, or animation. Pick one that you're more interested in and then full-speed ahead. These will make you useful in more than just game development roles, thus helping you in the future when you have trouble landing a game dev job. At least you'll still be doing something you like in the meantime, and still building your skill in that area. Many really popular game designers have specialties outside of just "Design". Some are excellent programmers, some are artists, some have excellent business skills (really good at project management), and some are brilliant story-writers. Most game design positions are not entry-level, because you REALLY have to know what you are doing, before someone will trust you enough to let you touch the design. The only real way to prove that you are actually a good game designer is by having games to show off. That proves that you have some idea of the design process and know how to maintain a game from start to finish. This is HARD.

Some like to say that these degree programs for game design help them by giving them the incentive to push through and finish their stuff, otherwise, they might not have the motivation. Well, that's very problematic, because that means that you will not be the type of person who can finish a game. Game development requires you to be highly self-driven.

Most of what "Game Design" programs teach you can be learned by picking up a few game design books and making your own games (alot of them, too). Game design is learned by making games, not by having a professor tell you about it. You have enough mentors in the game development community already. They will always be there to critique what you do and give you tips on how to improve your work. Pick up a couple of books like The Art of Game Design and Designing Games. You can look at other books in whatever other area you want to master and just get started on making games. Turn off your console and just get started. Start small. Make very simple, basic games to start off with (B.A.S.I.C.). It's about learning the process first. Do that while reading a ton of highly-detailed game postmortems online. Just learn the process. THAT will be your real education.

And finally, start working your way up to putting together a portfolio. Portfolios speak much louder than a resume (although, a resume is still important). And that doesn't mean having a bunch of "Game Design docs". Games. Not docs. Games. Then build up your confidence and hook up with a team, so you can fight your way together to the end of making a complete game. (this may be one of the only valuable things that a game design program can provide you out of the box, i.e., a team that you are forced to work on a game with)

The single most important tool you will ever have is discipline. No degree will be able to top that. Give up the idea of being a hardcore gamer, because you are now going to need to become a VERY disciplined person. You're going to need it.

Finally: Don't forget to have fun. Good luck! :)

u/codeherdstudios · 1 pointr/gamedev

+1 for Challenges for Game Designers, that book is great!

Designing Games was also another one that I found was pretty good.

u/nmaxcom · 1 pointr/RimWorld

Yes, plenty others are charging for DLC's and upgrades (erjemHOI4jrem). Here it's not exactly the same but.. more or less (read down).

Still, something doesn't quite fit. Bear with me.

Back in 2013 they raised 200k$ on Kickstarter with something that worked already:
> The game already exists, and the testers are already having good experiences with it. We've got a small crew of testers on the Ludeon forums sharing their experiences with the game. Take it from them, not from me.

Indeed, the game was already looking solid.. Even if graphically speaking we're looking at a Prison Architect copy&paste, which I don't think anyone mind, not even the guys from Prison Architect which is pretty cool, but still worth mentioning that no much innovation went there. What I mean by that is that most of the hard work (genre, game mechanics, plot and so on) was long done.

So that cash, an already big and thriving community, a kickstarter success and Steam Greenlit... All of that before ending 2013. So in that situation you already know what you are facing, what you'll need to change and so on. And since then, it's been selling at 30$.

According to steamdb.info (I don't know the reliability but doesn't seem crazy numbers) they have sold about 700k copies.

They do have developed 3 DLC's. For 170$, 15$ and 370$ aprox. The most expensive one says:

> This DLC gives you the right to enter a name and character backstory into the game, with skills, appearance, and special work requirements. In addition, your character will appear as the leader of another faction!
>
> Write yourself as an interplanetary detective, an entrepreneur, an ex-artist, or anything else you can think of. Players will recruit, command, and fight you for all time!
>
> [...]

The actual game dev has been very scarce in these years, for everything that I mentioned this game has going for it.

Anyhow, I do like this game. I like it a lot. I'm making it clear because after giving facts some people may get the wrong idea. It's not about thrashing it, quite the contrary.

I think the guy nailed it in terms of the game itself (BTW he actually has a pretty good book on game design) but with all that money and all that time, maybe (and of course here I can only talk out of my ass because can't know) he hasn't managed the growth well and/or he hasn't allied with someone to do it.

So now, instead of medium to big upgrades every month or two (Prison Architect style, another game from kickstar success; or even Minecraft) we have medium to big upgrades twice a year.

I hope this can be seen as the constructive criticism from someone that wants this game to crush it big time. And sooner rather than later.

u/pjsdev · 1 pointr/gamedesign

Okay, here are 4 suggestions about theory. There are plenty more, but these are a few of my favourites.

Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals

  • Chunky theory book and one of my favourites. Also has a companion book of essays

    Characteristics of Games

  • Really nice combination of chapters from various designers (including Richard Garfield of MtG) looking into different aspects of design.

    Game Mechanics: Advanced Game Design

  • All about systems and how resources move through them in games and the affect that has.

    Theory of Fun for Game Design

  • Easy to read, nicely illustrated and conveys a powerful fundamental idea for game design.

    Good luck and happy reading.
u/swivelmaster · 1 pointr/gamedesign

https://www.amazon.com/Theory-Game-Design-Raph-Koster/dp/1449363210

A much faster read, with pictures, but will give you a good framework for thinking about design.

u/SebastianSolidwork · 1 pointr/gamedesign

Its hard for me to grasp what you are looking for. I'm even not sure if even you are (in extend of Frasca).

I have worked on a improved differentitation: Ludonarrative Synthesis

Additionally i prefer the differentitation (on the ludo side) into the four interactive forms. Paidi matches to toy.

Simulation is to me anything that tries to be realistic as it can be. Which is mostly boring. An interessting system or narravtion is never realistic.

About boredomness i recommend Raph Kosters Theory of fun.


Most words i used here, are meant in a very specific way. Not in colloquial language.

u/YouAreSalty · 1 pointr/xboxone

>Feel free to lay out your case for this in great detail so I can tear it apart.

No need. Educate yourself. Start here.

Random internet user, feel free to tear apart Raph Koster book.

>However, Rare communicated and marketed heavily. I took in all that communication and marketing and they convinced me to purchase the game. A large number of people feel that their communication and marketing did not align with what they delivered. I could get a refund, but I believe in the future of the game so I choose not to and that is my choice.

That is not the impression I get at all, that they lied. Rather people were hoping there were more and got disappointed... This game has been well covered in alpha/beta and streamed.

> I could get a refund, but I believe in the future of the game so I choose not to and that is my choice.

That is your choice, but if you are unhappy with it I suggest you do get a refund. Vote with your wallet, because voting with your voice makes a lot of us others tired of hearing the same thing over and over. It is also likely more effective.

> If I have an accurate or inaccurate opinion, it is often that the business did something to contribute to that opinion even if it was inaccurate. So no matter what it is I think, I have in fact earned the ability to express it.

As I said, there is no "earning". Everybody has a right to their opinion. Earning suggest that someone else hasn't.

>Rare is better than this, so something is going on.

The one thing I was disappointed about is that they seemed to have indicated some sort of surprise with the Kraken, and then it turned out to just be a bodyless tentacles. I also wish the combat was a little tighter and less casually, but I think that is their design goal.

u/hiyosilver64 · 0 pointsr/truegaming

She might be interested in this:

http://www.amazon.com/The-Art-Video-Games-Pac-Man/dp/159962110X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1381262117&sr=8-1&keywords=video+games+are+art

Or even this:

http://www.amazon.com/The-Art-Game-Design-lenses/dp/0123694965/ref=sr_1_6?ie=UTF8&qid=1381262117&sr=8-6&keywords=video+games+are+art

Possibly even this:

http://www.amazon.com/Theory-Game-Design-Raph-Koster/dp/1449363210/ref=sr_1_4?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1381262296&sr=1-4&keywords=games+are+fun

I am a 65F gamer - let her know she's missing out if she ignores video games. Not only fun but uses the mind in ways older people tend to use rarely or stop using at times. The challenge of video games keeps the brain firing on all circuits. Puzzles, quests, challenge, etc., all combine to not only entertain but also to teach and to broaden thinking in general :)

u/GymHackers · -1 pointsr/NoFap

The research is there. You can:

u/eleitl · -1 pointsr/socialism

> they clearly all seem to be from the military

That is exactly the problem with it. They suffer from a bad case of Filter Bubble http://www.amazon.com/Filter-Bubble-What-Internet-Hiding/dp/1594203008 and removing dissenting voices only seals up their bubble further.

> you aren't going to get into a debate about collective ownership and fighting for the common man with most military guys are you

I think it's worth pointing out to them that they're getting not nearly as much uniform robot-nod-thank-you-for-your-invading-of-other-countries support in the general US population as they think.