UX Research
This is a collection of notes and links to all things User Experience from resources to interesting articles:
User Interface Design patterns
Summary: User Interface Design patterns are recurring solutions that solve common design problems. Design patterns are standard reference points for the experienced user interface designer.
Everything I Needed to Know About Good User Experience I Learned While Working in Restaurants
– Nielsen Norman Group
Summary: Satisfying user experiences build on good customer-service principles. Restaurant UX provides many lessons for design strategy.
Redesigning The Country Selector
– Smashing Magazine
Summary: How the formulaic approach to UX case studies is numbing our critical thinking as designers, and how to bring a unique point of view to our work.
The case study factory
– UX Collective
Summary: The country selector. It’s there when you create an account for a new Web service, check out of an e-commerce store or sign up for a conference. The normal design? A drop-down list with all of the available countries.
Interactivity considered harmful
– http://worrydream.com/
Summary: The ubiquity of frustrating, unhelpful software interfaces has motivated decades of research into “Human-Computer Interaction.” In this paper, I suggest that the long-standing focus on “interaction” may be misguided. For a majority subset of software, called “information software,” I argue that interactivity is actually a curse for users and a crutch for designers, and users’ goals can be better satisfied through other means.
How to start a new UI project (free video from Learn UI Design)
Copy If You Can: Improving Your UI Design Skills With Copywork
– https://www.smashingmagazine.com/
Summary: There’s a technique for improving one’s user interface design skills that is the most efficient way I know of expanding one’s visual vocabulary but that I’ve rarely heard mentioned by digital designers. I’m talking about copywork. Copywork is a technique that writers and painters have been using for centuries. It is the process of recreating an existing work as closely as possible in order to improve one’s skill. In our case, this means recreating a user interface (UI) design pixel for pixel.
The King vs. Pawn Game of UI Design
– https://alistapart.com/
Summary: If you want to improve your UI design skills, have you tried looking at chess? I know it sounds contrived, but hear me out. I’m going to take a concept from chess and use it to build a toolkit of UI design strategies. By the end, we’ll have covered color, typography, lighting and shadows, and more.
The Gestalt Principles
Gestalt Principles of Perception
– https://andyrutledge.com
Summary: Almost everything that makes graphic design work can be found in a set of laws and principles collectively known as the Gestalt principles of perception.