(Part 2) Top products from r/userexperience

hmm. Where to get started. Learn the gestalt principles of visual design. If you're designing interfaces - these little tips will help you associate, and differentiate well enough to be able to direct attention like a conductor.

Learn to do everything deliberately. If you don't have a reason for something, you're not designing, you're arting. Know the difference and when each is appropriate. For example - want a big splash screen with a fancy colorful image? Is it so you can attract the user to a particular part of the screen? Or is it because you have some extra space and feel like filling it with something. If it's the former, go for it. If it's the latter - you're just making an art project.

Learn about design methodologies, from a university if possible. Industrial design technique is very good for digital problem solving as well. Defining a problem, exploring solutions, and determining a valuable path are things that will help you in every project.

Understand why you are doing what you are doing. And who are you doing it for. Never go past page one without establishing those facts.

Stats will help you in that do everything intentionally part. If you can say 80 of people do this, 20 percent of people do that, you can from this say, that this gets center position, bright colors, dark shadow and lots of negative space. That thing that 20 percent of people do, gets bottom right, lowER contrast, and is there for people that expect it.

Good luck, conferences will help. Podcasts will help. Reading interviews from design teams at larger companies will help.

Asking reddit will help. What you should ask for is paid time off to study lol. Good luck.


edit:
Also get this book universal principles of design I think there's a pocket version. This teaches you what works and why and when to use it.


Get the design of every day things. This book teaches you what good design is. It asks the questions - what is design. When is design good. What is an affordance? How do we signal what things do what? How does all that work? Is a coffee cup good design? What about a scissors? How about google.com vs yahoo.com...

Check out don't make me think... or just think about the title for an hour and pretend you read the book.

a popular one now is hooked. Pavlov's dog experiments except with people, basically operant conditioning for designers.

And learn about grid systems and bootstrap for prototyping. Get a prototyping account. For something, proto.io, invision, framerjs.... Invest in omingraffle and sketch, get a creative cloud license if need be. You will need to show people things a lot. You will need to convince people of your ideas and your paths. You will need to constantly throw together quick and dirty visualizations of what you want to say. Invest in tools that make it simple.

Learn how to sell your ideas. You will be asked a ton of questions as people poke holes in your design. You need to figure out how to soothe their worries. They will your decisions, and you will have to show them that you have the answer. Learn how to present. Learn public speaking. Learn how to communicate with superiors. Learn how to talk with programmers. Learn how to give the programmers what they want from you. Learn how to negotiate, learn how to deliver on time. Learn how to handle stress.

Good luck.

This probably isn't the most helpful answer, but any resources I might have used to learn the fundamentals myself are probably pretty outdated now. Honestly I'd just try to find highly rated books on Amazon that are reasonably priced. I haven't read this one for psych research methods, but looking through the table of contents, it covers a lot of what I'd expect (ethics, validity and reliability, study design and common methods) and according to the reviews it's clear, concise, and has good stats info in the appendix. I had a similar "handbook" style textbook in undergrad that I liked. For practicing stats, I'm personally more of a learn-by-doing kind of person, and there are some free courses out there like this one from Khan Academy that covers the basics fairly well.

But if you can, take courses in college as electives! Chances are you'll have a few to fill (or maybe audit some if you can't get credit), so go outside of HCDE's offerings to get some complementary skills in research or design. I usually find classrooms to be more engaging than trying to get through a textbook at home on my own, and especially for psych research methods, you'll probably have a project that gives you hands-on experience doing research with human subjects (most likely your peers). There are lots of free online courses out there as well if you aren't able to take them for credit.

You guys are making me miss school.

Getting specifically into UX self-study, in addition to a UX-specific research methods book (this is a newer version of one I read in school) I'd also go through the UX classics like Don Norman's The Design of Everyday Things and Emotional Design, Krug's Don't Make Me Think, and Casey's Set Phasers on Stun (this last one being more of a fun read than a practical one).

Sorry that the image was unflattering, but here's the situation.

The image is from an article called We Are All Confident Idiots, which is by one of the researchers who discovered the Dunning-Kruger effect (explained in the article).

The relevance is that you are working with people who were presumably hired to be the UX experts because they are UX experts, but you are confidently disagreeing with them because your untrained gut feelings are different from the conclusions produced by their trained work.

You may pay for the skills of surgeons and pilots in your life, but you probably don't tell surgeons how to do your surgeries or pilots how to fly the plane. That would be unwise and disrespectful. Similarly, your UX designers have expertise that requires years of training. You can and should ask questions, and also should make sure that you've given them enough information to incorporate non-UX priorities into their process. But just swooping in to confidently disagree with them and tell them how to do it is unwise and disrespectful.

And adding insult to injury, you came here without any data or research, expecting us to automatically agree with you or something. To be honest, I'm not really sure what you were expecting to happen. But if you think that "modern UX is about dumbing things down" then you vastly overrate your own expertise on what modern UX is, and need your UX designers far more than you realize.

Again, sorry if this is unflattering. If it's any consolation, you aren't the first one to treat UX designers this way. Check out UXReactions and you'll see plenty posts of posts about clients and bosses who are confident that they know UX better than their UX designers. The difference is that you can be the one who learns better, laughs about it in hindsight, and does better going forward. You can also just ignore me because I'm just some guy on the internet to you. Either way, good luck going forward with your small business.

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Edit: As another consolation, I'll give you something that might be helpful for dealing with the problem you initially described. Today's Quote of the Day from the Interaction Design Foundation: "If the user can't use it, it doesn't work." Maybe that will shed some light on what your UX designers are thinking.

And for more thorough insight into the idea of designing complicated things for expert users, Living with Complexity by Don Norman is great. You'll quickly learn that "dumbing things down" isn't the point, and would often be a terrible design decision.

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:

• Depending on the industry the skill need will be different.
  
• Depending of the team the skill need will be different.
  
• There isn't one way to do user experience.
  
  
  Here are some of my resources I found helpful.
  
  (confessions: I've posted these before in other comments but I hope you find it helpful)
  
  Sub-reddits:
  
  
• /r/userexperience
  
• /r/hci
  
  Sites:
  
  
• http://ux.stackexchange.com/ <- Community to find and ask UX questions
  
• http://www.nngroup.com/ <- Read all the articles
  
• http://www.uie.com/ <-Video Training (More advanced)
  
• http://www.lynda.com/ <-Over 30 video training courses (Intro - may be more videos now... thats my last count)
  
• http://uxchecklist.github.io/ <-Intro to techniques
  
  Books:
  
  
• Don't Make me Think
  
• Designing with the Mind in Mind
  
• Lean UX
  
• The UX Book
  
• The Persona Lifecycle
  
• Sketching User experiences
  
• 100 things every designer should know about people
  
• Prototyping
  
• The User experience Team of One
  
• Interviewing users
  
• A Web for everyone
  
• See What I mean
  
• More here http://rosenfeldmedia.com/books/
  
  Tools (other than typical Adobe design tools):
  
  
• www.usabilityhub.com <- great for cheap/free prototype validation.
  
• http://www.invisionapp.com/
  
• http://www.axure.com/
  
• https://balsamiq.com/
  
• http://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/
  
  
  MISC:
  
  
• Types of UX Job Titles
  
  

What's worked for me really well was learning about the different roles that a UX oriented person can do. There are a lot of various hats you can wear under the UX umbrella like Interaction Designer, Information Architecture, User Research, and a few more from there.

I'd suggest doing your research, learning as much as you can whether that be reading the latest posts on blogs, reading books or even jumping on twitter and contacting some really great ux'ers out there right now.

I'm a designer that's slowly making the transition too, and this is what worked out really well for me, not saying it's going to be your answer but hopefully some of it helps!

I use www.uxmag.com to just read some articles and keep up to date on what people think within the field.

The best learning that I've had so far though would be from books that I've had suggested to me from various UX designers within the industry right now:

Emotional Design


Project Guide To UX Design

If you want to keep chatting about it feel free to PM me and I'll help out as much as I can! :)

Here are a few:

Elements of User Experience, Jesse James Garret: What a typical experience design process is made up of.

Designing Interactions, Bill Moggridge: Seminal thoughts on Interaction Design, holds up to this day

Don't Make Me Think, Steve Krug: One of the first books to gave the issues of IA and UX design a human, customer point of view.

About Face, Alan Cooper: Another take on the whole process, dives a bit deeper into every stage than Garret's book.

Designing For The Digital Age, Kim Goodwin: Human-centered digital products

Sprint, Jake Knapp: A condensed prototyping methodology

100 Things To Know About People, Susan Weinschenk: How people think

There are a few more Product Design related books I recommended in another thread.

IDEO's design thinking methodologies are also a great resource:

Design Kit, A book and toolkit about human centered design

Circular Design, A guide for holistic design, organization friendly.

Cheers

Just to make the difference clear, this is for qualitative data. With qualitative data, you can catch lots of quick wins and your major usability issues, but there's no way to statistically extrapolate this small a data set to the general population at large. That's what quantitative tests and statistics are for.

For qualitative studies, we (we being me, I guess, in my company) usually aim for seven, are satisfied with six, and call it good. That generally puts you at the upper part of that curve, but I'd never dare to make a generalization to the general public with that small a sample size.

For anyone who's interested in seeing the statistical side of things, check out this textbook: http://www.amazon.com/Measuring-User-Experience-Second-Technologies/dp/0124157815/

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.

I don't think there's a big difference, but just to see I did a little experiment. Here are major websites who publish lots of articles.

Serif train:
New York Times, The Guardian, Huffington Post, The Daily Beast, Reuters, NPR, New York Post, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, TIME, Bloomberg Businessweek, Newsweek, Forbes, Washington Post, Politico, LA Times, The Boston Globe, Wired

Sans serif boat:
BBC, NBC, Vox, Medium, Buzzfeed, Fox, ABC, CNN, Mashable, Us Weekly, The Onion, People, USA Today, Telegraph, NY Daily News, Fast Company

I think both serif and sans serif fonts can be readable if you pick a nice one. Leading, tracking, kerning, font weight, contrast, hierarchy, and minding characters per line are also important factors in readability.
If you're still font curious and want help making better font choices read Stop Stealing Sheep and Find Out How Type Works.

While I have very little empirical evidence to back this up, hells yes.

My company, for example, has become very active recently with using DOMO, Voice of Customer, Question Based Selling, and other data collection to help paint a picture of our customers personas, buying stages, and pain points

What I’d like to see more of is how to understand the classic psychology of customers where this data is identifying, and how the Creative Ops, Digital Teams, and campaign managers can use this knowledge to create better content that resonates.

It’s all here in this book: https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1484225791/ref=sxts_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1510422699&sr=1&pi=AC_SX236_SY340_QL65

So I would say you might need to design a position for yourself, but this angle could be very compelling.

1. Ethics of UX Design and the responsibility of UX Designers in particular - there's a book about this that just came out this year by Mike Monteiro, but I'm not seeing this discussion happen elsewhere.
   
2. UX Design for Next Billion Users - I know Google has a team dedicated to this - but I don't see designers talk about the challenges they face doing research and building products for people who are coming online only now - do you just tweak your app for each country or do you fundamentally rejig how it works? There are other big competitors to iOS and Android like KaiOS (100 million devices!) - how do you design for that? A lot of big consumer applications are designed and built in the US, but is now being deployed in different markets around the world, where social norms and online behaviors vary. What happens next? First time users don't have the mental models around technology and user interfaces that we take for granted - for example the magnifying glass icon for search gets mistaken for a Table Tennis racket by people who haven't used tech before.
   
3. The web is still dominated by English - what do we do now that people whose first language is not English are coming online? How do information architecture and layout practices change? How do accessibility concerns change?
   
4. UX Design for the Internet of Things - IoT is absolutely something I think we need to be looking at - and I see that people don't talk about it enough - because by putting a computer in anything, be it a toaster, a fridge, a microwave, a lightbulb - the scope of our discipline widens from designing for laptop/desktop/tablets

Sounds good to me!

Can I suggest a personal book that is more related to interaction design/industrial design than UX?

The guy who wrote it heads my Interaction Design course and I felt it to have some really good insights into designing both physical and screen-based products for disabled people.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Design-Meets-Disability-Graham-Pullin/dp/0262516748

There may be more recent resources out there now, but I found Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing to be a fascinating read on the topic. Especially considering it was published nearly 9 years ago!

No single source. Design has been around for a very long time. Modern UX Design comes out of a few different places, and different schools and different companies and studios have their own slightly different approaches. Of the couple I mentioned:

The IDEO and the Stanford D School has been the major driver for something called Design Thinking which is is framework for creative development.
Checkout this: https://dschool.stanford.edu/dgift/
and this: http://designthinkingmovie.com/

Lean Startup is a framework based on work done at Toyota focused on product management but which a lot of UX Design ideas have come out of as well.
Checkout this:
http://www.amazon.com/The-Lean-Startup-Entrepreneurs-Continuous/dp/0307887898

and this:
http://uxdesign.smashingmagazine.com/2011/03/07/lean-ux-getting-out-of-the-deliverables-business/

We are all Beagles. We train our animals, they train us back. Same as we are trained on a daily basis to use those products/apps/services that work for our needs. If you make a product for a solution to a user problem, users will train themselves to use it.

This is a fantastic book. I have no connection with author or get paid for the link.

Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1591847788/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_-5AQDbRDQKEBE

Set phasers on stun is the staple human factors book and exemplifies why proper ux is so important to product design.

https://www.amazon.com/Set-Phasers-Stun-Design-Technology/dp/0963617885

Acting with Technology: Activity Theory and Interaction Design

Learned about Activity Theory in a class (amongst other places), and wanted to go a bit deeper.

https://www.amazon.com/Practical-Web-Analytics-User-Experience/dp/0124046193

This book might be what you're looking for.

Research, hands down. It's hard to demonstrate the ROI up front. Read Tomer Sharon's It's Our Research if you want some actionable tips.