(Part 2) Reddit mentions: The best human-computer interaction books

I've recently completed my first game using Game Maker, and I couldn't be happier with the results. Game Maker is a pretty simple program to use, and it does wonders for making game development seem approachable and manageable. No coding is required, but you can still put in your own scripts if you want to get fancy (or you can just code the whole thing).

There is a pretty substantial free version that you can download here. Plus there are plenty of tutorials online that can help you out with the basics of making a game.

After that, I would recommend getting a book to help walk you through some of the more advanced things. Being a fan of platformers, I found this book to have everything I needed to help me learn what I needed to know to make my game. It has tutorials that walk you through step-by-step when creating a platformer game, and it does a great job of explaining what each and every bit of code does.

If making a platformer isn't your thing, you can maybe try this book. I've never read it, so I can't attest to what's in it, but it's written by the same people, so I'd imagine the quality is top notch as well.

Good luck with the motivation, man! Try not to compare yourself too much to other people though. Sure your first few games aren't going to compare to today's blockbusters. Hell, when you're starting out, you might even be envious of some indie developers as well. But these people have had years of experience. They started out making mediocre things too. You just have to keep at it, and eventually you'll be on the same level as them (and you won't even notice it!).

Pro-tip: Try to make as many games as possible, instead of trying to polish one game to perfection. You learn a lot more from completing projects than you can trying to perfect one. Having an opportunity to reflect on what you would do differently for next time is invaluable.

Anyhoo, just try to stay positive, and think about how awesome it is that you plan to make things that entertain other people (I mean seriously, how cool is that?!)

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
  
  

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.

This has been asked recently, so I'd recommend browsing the archives, but...

There are a ton of UX-focused books out there that focus on different areas. If you have an area you're trying to grow your skills in, let us know. There maybe better or worse books for that.

• If Disney Ran Your Hospital — I love this book because it's about user experience, but has nothing to do with websites or apps (which is pretty much all we think about when we say UX anymore). This really opens the world of UX to everything that the user experiences, from how they hear about your service, find it, consume it and remember it.
  
  
• The Essential Persona Lifecycle — This book helps you understand how to research your customers and users, which, at the end of the day, are the only thing that matters in true UCD. If toy can get buy-in for personas at your organization, the whole UX world opens up.
  
  
• The Anatomy of Type — This gets a little design heavy, but words, labels, and copy are so important to good usability, that understanding type at a deeper level is a must for me.
  
  I tend to shy away from books with UX in the title. It's just to trendy right now. UX isn't new by any stretch, though, so finding books that expand your horizons a bit is a good thing.

1 book by far is Andy Kirk’s. Data Visualisation: A Handbook for Data Driven Design https://www.amazon.com/dp/1526468921/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_rjx3DbDVRPFDN

It’s very broad and accessible yet substantial. That’s the book I recommend to anyone who need to read just one book.

2 is RJ Andrews book Info We Trust: How to Inspire the World with Data https://www.amazon.com/dp/1119483891/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_gmx3Db0FDG9DC.

This is a wonderful book that I read as an ode to visualization as a medium. It’s more artistic than Andy’s book both in its topic and its execution.

3 book depends on your specific interest. Dashboards/tableau? https://www.amazon.com/big-book-dashboard/s?k=big+book+of+dashboard.

Data art? https://www.amazon.com/dear-data-book/s?k=dear+data+book

Data journalism/ storytelling? Data-Driven Storytelling (AK Peters Visualization Series) https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07CCZPKV3/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_Msx3DbF1GZMG8

Science of visualization? https://www.amazon.com/Information-Visualization-Perception-Interactive-Technologies/dp/0123814642

Visualization from an academic point of view? https://www.amazon.com/Visualization-Analysis-Design-AK-Peters/dp/1466508914

D3js? https://www.amazon.com/Interactive-Data-Visualization-Web-Introduction/dp/1449339735

Theres a pretty good book about this I read years back, from around Vanila time. WoW factor

A guy thats a pretty high up CFO in Canada I think, comparing the skills in business to raid leading in WoW, and talks a lot about Blizzards business strategies with WoW too.

Thank you for the recommendation. Hadn't heard of that book.

I've done some research since your comment and I've determined that this seems like a worthwhile purchase so I'm going to buy this one for sure this evening.

Separately, The UX Book: Process and Guidelines for Ensuring a Quality User Experience, has been grabbing my attention as well. I'm curious if that one walks through the process in a similar way to About Face.

If you're just starting out, this book has helped me IMMENSELY: https://www.amazon.com/VR-Book-Human-Centered-Virtual-Reality/dp/1970001127

It explains pretty much everything we know about the history, optimization, creation and the future of virtual reality and I think is a must for any VR dev. Especially a beginner.

Just keep chipping away in Unity and you'll have a bright future!

This guy also has many good videos about building VR games: https://www.youtube.com/user/NurFACEGAMES

Given all of this, I would have to say stay in C++ and switch to wxWidgets. That way you avoid the overall pain of switching languages and you gain all of the other benefits you mention. As a motivating example, Epic Games has rewritten UnrealEd, their map editing tool, from being a C++/MFC application to being a C++/wxWidgets application.

For a very large application, I'm going to have to agree with your engineer who says that dynamic typing presents a maintenance nightmare. I can go into more details about that privately if you want more information. I'd also stay away from the bytecode-compiled-only, or interpreted, languages for obvious performance reasons.

Finally, wxWidgets has a quite good book available, Cross-Platform GUI Programming with wxWidgets. Documentation matters!

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.

This isn't specifically on simulation game design, but it's always a great read for game design:

Theory of Fun for Game Design

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.

I can look some up. A few of the top google search results:

• America’s Army, meant to act as a recruiting tool for the U.S. military, cost $32.8 million over eight years and in 2009 even received four guiness world record awards for it's success (e.g. most downloaded war game & most played hours FTP war game). [Wired]
  
• In 2008 the US Army announced they invest $50 million into their own video games unit in the next 5 years. [Guardian]
  
• They spent $4 million to comission the Xbox game Full Spectrum Warrior, where a custom version was used for training.
  
• Book like this one might interest you: War Play,
  
  Military spending is also a very common thing in Hollywood, where there's a lot more evidence (good article here). Interesting stuff.

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

Packt amazingly has some good books on Tkinter such as "Tkinter GUI Application Development Blueprints" and "Python GUI Programming with Tkinter: Develop responsive and powerful GUI applications with Tkinter"

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!

Looked on Amazon, found it.

>March 7, 2017

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

I'm fascinated by the topic of videogames and learning - James Paul's book is really good:

What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy

Heh, I had to buy this back at uni (only the 2nd edition)

For how much I used it that sure was £30 that would have been better spent on food!

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

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

>
>
> What other skills do I need apart from basics- html, css, basic js, design?

A good place to start is "The Design of Everyday Things" by D. Norman. HCI is a huge topic that goes far beyond making things like nice. You have to get into usability testing too, and consider cultural differences (Hofstede etc). We used the 'Interaction Design' textbook on our course, it was boring as fuck but covers all the basics.

Bücher:

https://www.amazon.de/Dont-Make-Think-Revisited-Usability-ebook/dp/B00HJUBRPG/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1479557141&sr=8-4&keywords=ux

https://www.amazon.de/Hooked-How-Build-Habit-Forming-Products-ebook/dp/B00NW01MKM/ref=pd_sim_351_3?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=VPBHSSF5YYXVZWHXE2TT

https://www.amazon.de/Web-Fatale-gestaltest-widerstehen-Interaktion/dp/3836238985/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1479557277&sr=8-3&keywords=user+interface+design


https://www.amazon.de/UX-Research-Practical-Techniques-Designing/dp/149195129X/ref=sr_1_6?ie=UTF8&qid=1479557171&sr=8-6&keywords=ux

https://www.amazon.de/UI-Communication-Intuitive-Interfaces-Effective/dp/0123969808/ref=sr_1_6?ie=UTF8&qid=1479557114&sr=8-6&keywords=user+centered+design

http://www.amazon.com/Video-Games-Teach-Learning-Literacy/dp/1403965382

UI is Communication?

I've the same problem as you and I started read books about this issue, you may want to read this one: Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked it will open your mind on a lot of things.