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Reddit mentions of 100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know About People (Voices That Matter)
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Reddit mentions: 17
We found 17 Reddit mentions of 100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know About People (Voices That Matter). Here are the top ones.
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- New Riders Publishing
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Here are some things I (and I know others) have struggled with. I think the web is exploding with resources and information, so I don’t necessarily think we need to explain what a prototype is. There’s better places elsewhere to learn things about UX, but I think we could provide some good resources for not just people new to UX but everyone else too. I’m coming at this from what I wished I would have access to when I was trying to get into the field. I know that /u/uirockstar has some good walls of text that probably should be included as well. Feel free to suggest any changes to what I have here.
I really want to begin a career in UX/UI. What do I do?
Well, first it’s important to know that UX and UI are not synonymous. While many job postings combine them, UI is a subset of UX, just as research and information architecture are. UI is still important and if you can do both, you do increase your value. While many see UX as a research field at its core, the UX/UI title implies that it’s only about creating pretty things.
The first step is learning more about the field, which brings us to…
What kind of education do I need?
If you are still in school, there are more places recently that are offering courses in human-computer interaction. You can even try to create your own internships. There are very few UX specific schools, though they are starting to pop up, like Center Centre and General Assembly.
Yeah, yeah, that’s great. But I already graduated, so where do I start?
Any focus on people or technology can act as a solid foundation for learning UX. Because there has never been a set entrance path into the field, UX roles are filled with people from many different backgrounds. The most common degrees for those in the field though are design, psychology, communications, English, and computer science. link
There are a number of people in the field who are self-taught. There are tons of books, blogs, and designers (here are some helpful resources) which provide enough UX stuff to keep us all busy. When I first started reading about it, I quickly got overwhelmed because there was so much information available and most of it was intended for those who already had a pretty good grasp on things. The Hipper Element’s crash courses in UX and user psychology are great places to get a fairly quick overview.
There are books like The Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman, 100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know About People by Susan Weinschenk and Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug that make for great first books.
UX Mastery has a great eBook for getting started, appropriately titled Getting Started in UX. Kevin Nichols’ UX for Dummies is both very readable, yet detailed. You can even buy the eBook if you don’t want people on the bus to think you’re a “dummy.”
Lastly, Fred Beecher has a very extensive Amazon list of recommended UX books, depending on what area you are looking to learn more about.
Great. I’ve read a whole bunch of stuff and have a pretty good idea how UX works. Now how do I get someone to hire me so I can gain experience?
Hey, easy there. While, yes, there are lots of UX jobs out there, very few are entry level and not many employers will hire someone who has only read about it and not actually done it. You can’t get a job without experience and you can’t get experience without a job. I know. Frustrating, right?
You have to prove that you can do it. One way to do this is site redesigns.
Go find a website that lacks in it’s user experience and figure out how to fix it. Maybe it’s a small business down the street from you or maybe it’s a feature on eBay you think could be better. Redesigning sites is a good way to practice a process and make mistakes on your own time. If you can involve the owner from that small business down the street, that’s even better because then you can get a sense of the customers (users) that you will be designing for.
Once you have done this, you have (some) experience! Start a portfolio and add to it!
But I have a resume. Why do I need a portfolio?
Resumes are great. But resumes won’t get you a job starting out. It’s a million times more effective to show potential employers what you have done, rather than showing them a resume showcasing that you are a team player and proficient in Microsoft Office. But you should still have a resume that outlines your UX skills.
But I’ve never worked in UX! What should I put on my resume?
You don’t need to put all of your old jobs on your resume if they are unrelated to the field. Most places still want to see some work history so they know you haven’t been living in a cave for the last four years, but they don’t care about how you sold vacuum cleaners or trained circus horses. Maybe you can relate some crossover UX skills to your previous work.
Back to portfolios. They are a lot like elementary math class in that you want to show your work. Potential employers are much more interested in how you made a design decision rather than the final result. If your portfolio just has a bunch of fancy wireframes, that doesn’t tell them how you took specific personas into account and you are simply showing them something that looks pretty. And just because it looks pretty doesn’t always mean it makes sense.
Okay. I have a portfolio with a few unsolicited site redesigns in it.
Congratulations! But I have some bad news. Are you sitting down?
No one wants to hire you yet. You haven’t worked on any “actual” projects that showed how your UX skillz helped a business. I know I suggested you do site redesigns to get practice and you should because that is work you can take to a nonprofit or another small business and say, “here are some trial runs that I’ve done that prove I know what I’m doing and now I can help you for free in exchange for adding it to my portfolio.”
They’ll probably be skeptical and say, “hmmm… I don’t think my website needs this newfangled user experience you speak of and—wait did you say free?”
You both get something out of it and you’re doing it pro bono, which relieves you the pressure of making one tiny mistake. (There is a great site called Catchafire that matches non-profits all over the country with people looking to donate their time and skills.)
Once you have a portfolio displaying your work and some experience, start applying! But there is one more aspect that goes into getting hired and that is the people who will hire you.
Ugh, but isn’t networking just using people for my own professional gain?
I had this same mindset and it probably delayed my entrance into the field. I wanted to rely only on the quality of my work and trusted the rest would follow. I avoided networking and meeting people in the field because I didn’t want it to seem like I was only mooching for a job.
But the fact is people are altruistic in nature and like helping others. Many people also enjoy talking about themselves, and those are the two main principles of an informational interview. You’ll also find that people are excited to help others get started since they remember how difficult it was (see: this blog post).
It wasn’t until I started getting those informational interviews and talking with people at UXPA and MeetUp groups that I learned another side of UX, but also got more familiar with more hiring managers or those that knew them. Whenever possible, people will hire those they know and like. Until you get out and start shaking hands and kissing babies, you will be just another faceless name in a stack of resumes.
Meeting with recruiters/staffing agencies is also a good route as they make money by finding you a job, so they have a vested interest in giving you constructive criticism.
I've heard that you have to live in a big city to get a job in UX.
Move. Just kidding. But while it’s true that larger cities like New York, San Francisco, and Seattle are full of opportunities, there are plenty of other places around the country that have jobs. Here are the top 20. If you live in a tiny city, expect a tougher time finding a position.
Okay, I got an interview. How do I not mess this up?
Some great advice is to go all UX on your preparation and treat the interviewer like a user.
.......to be continued.
Blogs:
Other:
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.
If you are going the book route, I have a few suggestions for you!
Not sure if he's a reader? Check out Challenges for Game Designers Basically a collection of game problems to solve, flexing those 'be creative within a bounded scenario' muscles that a lot of big dreamers don't have enough experience with.
Another solid choice is this one,
100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know About People (Voices That Matter). In general it's talking about layouts/formatting, but super solid read for our industry as well.
Both of these are light and fun reads. If you think they might be interested in something heavier, I can post some in that vein as well.
Ecco la mia lista/elenco disordinato.
Mi piacerebbe spiegare il perché su ogni libro letto ma sarebbe troppo lungo. Se sei interessato ad un feedback in particolare, fammi sapere in un commento.
In generale: in questo periodo si trova molta letteratura; io consiglio i classici, perché in giro c'è molta bullshit e ho elencato anche tutta una serie di libri per acquisire conoscenza su skills complementari (es. negoziazione, persuasione).
Ho elencato i libri di Codice Edizioni a parte perché uno dei pochi editori che pubblica saggi su argomenti contemporanei come tecnologia e media.
Una parola in più la spendo per i libri di Mari e Munari: sono dei classici che vanno letti. Punto.
LIBRI
UX
Design e comunicazione
Sul retro del tovagliolo. Come risolvere problemi e vendere idee con le immagini
Data visualization
Usabilità
Tipografia
Negoziazione
Codice edizioni
LINKS
Community
Aggregatori
Ispirazione
Essenziali
Guru e pionieri
Tipografia
SEO
Data Visualization
Interaction design, hacking
Design generale
Serie TV
Black Mirror
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
This book is on my list.
A dot grid notebook would be good. From Behance. From Moleskine.
Portable whiteboard.
Pantone thermo cup.
not tied directly to touch panels, but i found the following books help my touch panels look less like an engineer designed them.
Design of everyday things
100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know About People
this one provided insight sticky design, and what makes some apps stand out, it a world of apps it dose hurt to see what is driving some mobile platform/ product development.
Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products
infocomm published the dashboard for controls, but it is quiet dated, and as pointed out below its counter any kind of modern ui design principal.
Not exclusive to web design, but the best design book I ever read was '100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know About People' by Susan Weinshenk.
http://www.amazon.com/Things-Designer-People-Voices-Matter/dp/0321767535/
It deals with a psychological understanding about how people view and interact with works of design, putting it in relevant terms to help make design decisions. Fascinating stuff.
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
Is there opportunity at your company to conduct user research? Is there a team devoted to it or do senior designer do research? Have you stumbled across situations where research would help you answer questions about your designs and prototypes?
Having a more advanced degree in some form of research, psychology or advanced UX/HCI would be beneficial if what you really want to do is research. Most of the user researchers I work with have masters in market research or user research and also teach classes to undergrads.
However you do not have to have a degree to learn it. There’s a few books out there that can help, such as Interviewing Users: How to Uncover Compelling Insights or Validating Product Ideas: Through Lean User Research
I also love this book that doesn’t have much to do with research but more about the behavioral science behind user interactions
100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know About People (Voices That Matter) .
If you want to have a bit more of a broad understanding of design then check out 100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know About People ... it's a nice way of understanding the 'why' of design which will compliment your more practical learning.
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:
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:
Sites:
Books:
Tools (other than typical Adobe design tools):
MISC:
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 would go to amazon.com and order a bunch of books. Then read them. :)
Design encompasses a lot of things. You need to learn what it aesthetically pleasing. Some people are just bad at it, but you can learn it to some extent. Go to dribbble.com and other design showcases to get a sense of what looks right... and what doesn't. Learn the basics of design so you have some tools to evaluate it with. (If you don't know about kerning, you never notice badly kerned words etc.) So get the knowledge, then practice.
Then you need to have the abilities to create nice things. That involves doing tutorials and learning to use a program like photoshop and illustrator.
Another part of design is more "logical". You need to learn how people think and use websites. So that you can design with purpose (otherwise you are just making pretty pictures). You need to learn conventions of the web and information architecture.
Then you also need to get a feel for... the "feel" of sites. If you can make great looking sites that are easy to use and nicely organizes it is still not enough. If the design does not represent the company and speak to the target audience it is still a more or less useless website. You need to learn the meaning of colors and the styles of different industries. What looks feminine, what looks childish, playful, high-end, corporate... etc.
So...important topics are: information architecture, basics of design, color theory, photoshop books (to learn raw skills), illustrator books, usability books... there are also specific web design books that cover several topics briefly.
This is a great one:
http://www.amazon.com/Things-Designer-People-Voices-Matter/dp/0321767535/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1332011684&sr=8-1
Alternatively, read web design blogs. Start with Smashing Magazine.., they have a whole network. Go to "network" and then you can find a lot of other blogs.
I love Susan Weinschenk!
This list quotes from her book: http://www.amazon.com/dp/0321767535/ref=rdr_ext_tmb
See page 193.
/edited.
I think getting a baseline of UX fundamentals is much needed, otherwise you'll be copying other UI patterns that won't necessarily work for your site. I would suggest "100 Things Every Designer Needs To Know About People" by Dr. Susan Weinschenk. And after that, learn how to sketch out layout and UI patterns by hand. It's shocking how much you'll start to question your layout just by that 15 minute exercise instead of diving right into a Bootstrap theme.
http://www.amazon.com/Things-Designer-People-Voices-Matter/dp/0321767535
Sorry, three weeks later and here I am!
It's hard for me to give advice in a way, because my path into design was quite unorthodox. I started as a computer science major in college, but quickly shifted into a more broad "Information Sciences and Technology" which included human-computer interaction but also things more networking related. It was a great "catch-all" for various technology-related fields. I ended up enjoying the HCI part the most by far.
My first "real" job was working for an agency as one of their developers. I can distinctly remember hearing how the creative director had started as a coder and moved entirely into design and for a while that notion was appealing to me. I taught myself design on the side, devouring many books and carefully examining the site designs created by our designers.
A few years later, I was working for a college as their web manager and saw a window of opportunity; they were beginning the process for a website redesign. Almost as a lark, I pushed out what I thought the new website should look like and presented it to the other members of the web committee. They all liked my design and decided to work in-house with me as the designer and principle developer.
So my advice for you is perhaps a little generic, but I think still helpful: never stop learning. Keep reading all you can about UX, UI design, HCI, and the industries that interest you for product design. If you see an opportunity to grow professionally, whether that is a promising job offer or some project that has just coalesced, be bold and try your hand at it. Don't talk yourself out of a chance to grow before even trying; it's an easy pitfall.
For breaking in: read all that you can, for example this book is an excellent resource and quick read. Have an opinion on everything; for the things that you don't know, be curious and thoughtful. Recognize what makes for a bad user experience and what makes for a good one. Be empathetic.
Hope that helps. Good luck to you!