What are the best resources available online for learning design thinking?
Design can only be learned by doing.
The Stanford d.school has a Virtual Crash Course at http://dschool.stanford.e
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UPDATE 5/9/16: IDEO U has paid courses on ideou.com taught by some of their heavy hitters.
UPDATE 4/15: Coursera is currently running a class: “Design: Creation of Artifacts in Society” starting April 29, from Karl Ulrich at UPenn/Wharton. He’s also published a free e-book you can use with or without the course: http://ulrichbook.org
Also on Coursera: Human-Computer Interaction from Stanford’s Scott Klemmer, started March 31.The material is geared towards making user interfaces, but the design thinking process is simply a generalization of the design process, which Klemmer uses throughout in the context of UI. Recommended!
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After every project, no matter how small, ask yourself: “How did the process work for me? Where do I feel confident? Weak? Excited? Anxious?” Then iterate and improve yourself. Don’t judge yourself too harshly. If you aren’t failing, you aren’t doing it right. But remember: design is supposed to be playful and fun.
After that, try using the d.school “mixtapes” (more in-depth) http://dschool.stanford.e
Then study the Bootcamp Bootleg: http://dschool.stanford.e
Find someone else interested in learning with you, and use something like Edistorm to brainstorm with them, and Evernote to keep track of your interview notes and design insights and ideas.
Finally, find someone who can mentor you online. I don’t know of a comprehensive course, so the best option is to get someone with experience to coach you through it. [I just started doing this for a friend.]
And then… do a few more design projects! Get involved with OpenIDEO. Make boring things fun. Think big and start small. And let us know how it goes!
What are good resources to learn the basics of UX?
I’ll keep it simple:
Start with Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman. then Elements of User Experience by JJ Garrett, then Designing for Interaction by Dan Saffer, then Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, and finally Sketching User Experience by Bill Buxton. The path after those books can take you into a million possible directions, but starting there will give you the gravity leap into outer space that you need.
Next to all this is find a community and a mentor. You need the community to learn from through example and conversation and you need a mentor who can guide you individually.
Good luck.
UI/UX Design Patterns: What are good examples of registration flows that require a lot of info but manage to make it a painless experience?
When Twitter redesigned their sign up process with the goal of increasing user engagement, they actually added a screen / step. But, that actually helped them and they said the experienced a 29% increase in growth. It’s articulated very well in this article: http://www.lukew.com/ff/e
The key is to break up the sign up / process into logical steps for the user, keeping in mind that if you can show the user the result of their action, then they’re much more likely to keep going. People love feedback – show it to them.
How do UI Designers work with engineers to ensure their vision is achieved?
The design is what ships. Therefore, working with engineers is critical. Here are some of my top techniques for this:
1. Figure out which type of engineer you’re working with
Some are not very interested in design and would just like you to spec out everything in great detail so they can focus on their thing. Others have a lot of good design ideas. Get them involved in the process early so you get their ideas and buy in.
2. Skim all bugs and code reviews for the product
That way you know what’s actually going on with the code and find out about issues that affect the design but engineers might not realize you’d care about.
3. Do some front-end coding (but not too much)
Doing a little coding helps you get the details right in the design and also earns you a lot of respect from engineers. However, it can take too much time away from design so use sparingly.
4. Sit by engineers
When your desk is by the engineers you’ll be involved in the hallway conversations and will build genuine friendships. You’re also more likely to see working versions of the code every step of the way so you find out about problems early.
5. Show the vision
Designers are really good at imagining interfaces from a simple description or wireframes so we tend to underestimate the power of making the vision concrete with a prototype or video. If you show a compelling vision at the right time engineers will often get inspired and put in the extra effort to dial in the implementation.
6. Involve engineers in user research
When they see a user using the product directly or hear about a pain point first hand on a field study, it’s a thousand times more compelling than the report afterwards.
7. Choose your battles
Unfortunately It’s almost never possible to get every pixel and flow just right. Cut stuff you don’t absolutely need so the essentials get more polish. Give in sometimes and save your capital for the things that matter most.
8. Don’t whine
UX people sometimes get into a habit of complaining about how no one will listen to their ideas. This can be a self fulfilling prophecy as then you start to sound weak and unauthoritative. Without being arrogant or closed minded, try to carry yourself with a demeanor that you are confident that your ideas and viewpoint are essential for the team to succeed.
What do you think about Clear?
It’s a lovely novelty, but ultimately not very useful, which defeats the objective in something I would consider to be a ‘utility’; a software discipline where form should always play second fiddle to function.
It’s a beautifully crafted user interface. It’s not innovative as many reviews have claimed, but evolutionary – I think Steve Jobs would have appreciated the vision – in that it takes existing conventions to the next level, rather than introducing entirely new ones.
Feature-set-wise, it’s early days yet, and it would be unfair of me to trash it entirely simply because it doesn’t sync with iCloud. That said, to defend its shortcomings by claiming that the very ethos of the app is about simplicity and purity (as many reviewers have done) would be to overlook the environment into which this app was conceived – a mobile environment, capable (and indeed demanding) of incredibly sophisticated contextual awareness. To build an app that ignored this environment in favour of some kind of zen-like state of simplicity would be monumentally shortsighted. I find it impossible to believe that this is the case with Clear.
We have to trust that these features are on the roadmap, and that a release-early-and-often policy is in place, as would be the case in any good agile development pipeline.
Effective (and successful) UX is not about removing complexity; rather it is about concealing and gradually revealing that complexity in order to make sophisticated software *feel* simple and intuitive.
My only real criticism of Clear is that those elements that make it so brilliant are exactly the same elements that render it so useless. The app seeks to be more useful than other similar utilities by stripping out complexity and using graceful, tactile gestures to mimic real-world physical interaction. Unfortunately, the practical limitations that these beautiful interractions impose on the interface only serve to erode its value as a utility.
For example, restricting the number of characters I can use on an item makes the interface and its response to my gestures graceful and more beautiful. But in doing so, it also renders the app completely unfit for purpose. Instead of having to concentrate on learning a few new interractions, I now have to invent and memorise dozens of new acronyms in order to help the app to fulfil its purpose. Why bother?
For me, Clear is a perfect example of how inspired interraction design can crush a potentially perfect user experience under the weight of its own brilliance.
What do you think about Clear?
**EDIT** After using the Clear app for a few months, I’ve grown to like it quite a bit. The team did an amazing job in predicting / gambling that users would grow into learning the App UI etc.
I might be alone in thinking this, but the Clear app feels like it tries too hard to be different. An app that requires that many instructions for gestures and how to use the interface tells me the team might’ve gone too far trying to re-invent the wheel. More specifically, I found the long swipe vs short swipe annoying. The ‘pull to create task’ is brilliant but having such a similar gesture to navigate sections didn’t do it for me. However, I have a lot of respect for the team for pushing the boundaries and shipping.
What would qualify someone as a junior UX designer, apart from years of professional experience?
I think the answer depends on what you mean by UX designer. Knowledge of HTML/CSS is not a core skill of a UX designer in my mind, but obviously others have different viewpoints. Job titles in this field tend to be a clusterf*ck, with a lot of people slapping UX onto theirs because it’s the in thing to do.
From my point of view, a UX designer focuses on interaction design and information architecture, e.g. using research (either your own or done by user researchers) to understand the user goals and needs, creating user models such as personas, scenarios, or task analysis, and using that information to inform the behavior and interaction design of a webside or application.
So, I would say that a portfolio that includes sample wireframes, site maps, user models, and other ux deliverables (e.g. http://semanticstudios.co
The best way to move into UX design is to do it sideways from a ‘bordering’ discipline such as front end dev, visual design, or business analysis. If you already have a job or experience doing one of those things, you can start looking for opportunities to do more “ux-y” work, and before you know it, you’re a ux designer!
What would qualify someone as a junior UX designer, apart from years of professional experience?
At 37signals, we don’t have “UX” positions but we do hire UI designers.
I look for three key things (besides good character, the most important):
- You are very comfortable with HTML/CSS (at minimum) and you can build your ideas.
- You can write well.
- You have good taste and intuition about what matters in a design.
A selection of sample projects (personal/hobby projects) will demonstrate #1 and #2.
For #3, people can develop skill but they don’t develop taste. It’s there or it’s not. When your taste is higher than your current skill level, you can bridge the gap by talking about who you love, who’s work you look up to, and what gets you excited.
What are some recent advances in UI design and better interfaces?
Recently (Jan 2012) came across a couple of innovative UI’s on the mobile front:
1. Clear for iPhone: http://vimeo.com/35693267
2. Scorekeeper XL:
http://www.youtube.com/wa
Update: There’s a similar Quora question with some great examples of leading UI over time: What are examples of innovative UI design?
What company’s UIs are at the forefront of design, and why?
Mark BurtonPath 2.0 has changed the way people think about social networking on mobile devices forever. It will be exciting to see what the team does from here.See how a sample Path menu was made in CSS3 here (pretty amazing): http://lab.victorcoulon….