Design: What are the best resources for learning bleeding-edge web, UI and UX design?
- Studying psychology and HCI (behavior and perception)
- Studying art and industrial design (interfaces)
- Studying anthropology and sociology
- Studying popular culture
- Studying the virtual and physical environments of your target audience
The "resource" is experience and knowledge of human behavior, our visual and tactile senses, our emotional response mechanisms, cultural norms for our age groups (do we trust banks? what do i define as "private"? do i know how to use a digital camera?), and so on. Anybody with a pirated copy of photoshop and a few Top 10 tutorials can make the pixels that sit on top of your engineering pretty, but user experience, and the interface with which your users interact, isn't something that comes from an O'Reilly's book or Sitepoint article.
If there is one single book I will recommend, it is this:
Thoughtful Interaction Design: A Design Perspective on Information Technology. MIT Press, 2004
http://www.amazon.com/Tho
But do not expect it to have all the answers you seek...It's just the first book I recommend to people learning how to design with empathy.
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