[HN Gopher] The self-taught UI/UX designer roadmap (2021) ___________________________________________________________________ The self-taught UI/UX designer roadmap (2021) Author : homarp Score : 246 points Date : 2022-10-01 15:16 UTC (7 hours ago) (HTM) web link (bootcamp.uxdesign.cc) (TXT) w3m dump (bootcamp.uxdesign.cc) | RedShift1 wrote: | I feel like it is missing one thing: sit next to users and watch | them use your software. | cpeterso wrote: | An alternative to traditional usability testing: Drunk User | Testing! Your testers will be a little dumber and a lot more | honest. :) | | https://uxpamagazine.org/boozeability/ | cpursley wrote: | OpenReplay and Posthog both have session recording for JS apps. | It's been really insightful (and often painful) watching our | customers use/struggle with our software. | | There's others but those two are open source if you're | concerned about user privacy. | karaterobot wrote: | Posthog's site seems to be down, but thanks for posting | these. I tried to pitch my company on Fullstory or Hotjar, | but failed for reasons these options (which I did not find in | my research, somehow) might address. | james_impliu wrote: | (Ironically it might be an ad blocker in your browser | causing this!) | snide wrote: | Read the entire document. There's a big section on research. | RedShift1 wrote: | I did read the document, it talks about user interviews, | surveys, testing solutions, etc... But never once the actual | act of the designers sitting next to users and just observing | what happens. | somat wrote: | I think design as an independent study is a mistake. it should | always be coupled with underlying system engineering. | | When they are decoupled you end up with architects making pretty | buildings that are hard to build and operate. software that looks | nice framed on a wall but trips up the casual user and is | downright painful for the Professional user. and stylish consumer | goods where the style interferes with the function. | whiteboardr wrote: | You nailed all problems with design education in that comment. | | Rich Gold's fabulous book "Plenitude" comes to mind. | cloudking wrote: | UI = how your product looks and feels | | UX = how your product makes users feel | | Well designed products have to balance looking nice with not | frustrating users. | lvl102 wrote: | I feel the UI/UX space is so full of zero skill people. | insightcheck wrote: | Is this really true, though? It's maybe plausible that people | can hold positions without doing much, but I was under the | impression that UI/UX requires a lot of expertise. | | From a couple of days ago on HN [1], it's possible to have over | 1,000 layers on Figma just to create a button [2] and over | 10,000 layers on an entire website. And that's just for | creating a design on Figma. Then there is the field of UX | research to gather data on the design, the sense behind | choosing colors and typography for UI, a familiarity with | working with shadows to create a sense of depth on the page, | and even working with sound and audio for feedback. | | I don't even see how it's possible to hold a UI/UX position and | not do anything, because there are very clear deliverables that | can be asked for, and a manager can soon tell if a person isn't | completing the work. It's plausible that low-skill people can | exist in the field, but I genuinely can't imagine how one could | stay low-skill yet keep the position. | | [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33013182 | | [2] https://imgur.com/TodWS0r | yetanotherloser wrote: | Design is really important and a genuinely difficult skill. | Unfortunately UI/UX design is a growth area that is currently | attracting useless chancers like shit in a honey-and-vinegar | sauce attracts flies. I feel a bit sorry for chancers because | it must be a bit grim to know you are useless and have to | fake it... but not so sorry I will hire one, or treat the one | hired by someone else as the star they claim to be. | diordiderot wrote: | > 1,000 layers on Figma just to create a button | | Really proves the no skill point. | ceejayoz wrote: | 1000 layers for a button is a misleading description of the | linked image. It's an entire design system for every button | in an app. | tpmx wrote: | It's a bit like with developers. At least 50% are crap. | lvl102 wrote: | I really view UI/UX position as an excuse to have "friends" | around the company. | emadabdulrahim wrote: | You must work for a really mediocre company? | | Design makes or breaks a product. Not sure where you got | the impression that it's useless and professional designers | gets nothing done. | lvl102 wrote: | I am not contesting that UI/UX is incredibly important | and hard. It's just that 99.99% of the people in that | profession are clueless. | emadabdulrahim wrote: | Are 99.99% of developers clueless? | | I'm just trying to understand what makes you think that | in the field of design, 99.99% of the professionals are | clueless? What about in the marketers? Are they also | 99.99% clueless? | | Trying to learn how non-designers think of the | profession/professional designers. | rileymat2 wrote: | Having worked with an excellent UX designer, specifically | not a graphic designer, he was great. | | The difference between him and the other ones I have run | into sense, he watched users use the product, he would | ask users how they might operate low fi paper mock ups, | before us developers even saw the design. He tried his | best not to project his own preferences and | idiosyncrasies on the interaction design. | | On the other hand, I have not seen this since. Compared | to him, in my anecdata 90% are not clueless, but pretty | bad. | rileymat2 wrote: | To add on, he was not some genius, what he did was | listen. | tpmx wrote: | I don't doubt that there are a number of broken companies | where that is the case. Sorry if you're in such a place :/ | nfw2 wrote: | I agree that a lot of UI/UX professionals have dubious | qualifications. | | That said, talented designers can arguably be a company's most | valuable employees. Product design is the axis on which many | tech companies compete, not technological innovation. Technical | competency is table stakes. | agumonkey wrote: | I hesitate to conclude this but I have a feeling that this is a | 'wishful sketching' profession for many. | ForOldHack wrote: | I was hired on words alone also: I critiqued their design, and | gave them some tips and guidelines: Hired on the spot. Designed | part of an app, that was so well liked, it became standard and | lore. | | This article in particular is next level. Even if you know UX, | even if you are great at UX, this one is good. | uxcolumbo wrote: | Why is it called UI/UX designer? | | UX is an umbrella term covering many design disciplines, like | interaction design, UI design or research. | | UI is a subset of UX. | | Someone who is good at both interaction design, IA, research and | UI is nowadays called (digital) product designer. | | It's somewhat frustrating that the design industry can't agree to | use the right terms. | oxff wrote: | I think UX designers have already caused enough havoc, we don't | need more of them | klysm wrote: | How do you reconcile this with a lot of software having | horrible UX? It has real consequences | linguae wrote: | Here's my take: in many projects there are design and | engineering tradeoffs that put the user's needs and interests | against the company's interests. A simple example would be | ads. Many websites and software tools rely on ads for | funding. There are many ways to serve ads with varying | impacts on the user experience. The challenge is serving the | ads in a way that brings in acceptable amounts of revenue | while not alienating users with annoying, intrusive ads that | drive users to their competitors. | | Of course, there are many situations where users can't use | competing software, or where there is no competitor. This | leads to resentment, and I believe some of the negative | sentiment against some UI/UX designers comes from people | being burned by bad experiences caused by UI/UX being | optimized for the interests of the company instead of the | user. | runarberg wrote: | What do you mean? Are telling us that a lot of people in the | UI/UX industry don't have talent? Are you telling us that the | UI/UX industry is bad? Can you clarify, otherwise a lot of | people here--that are members of that industry--are gonna | assume you mean they aren't good at their jobs, and will take | offense. | karaterobot wrote: | Design is a side-effect of making choices. The idea is that you | get someone to do it who has experience and is thinking very | hard about it, and testing their assumptions. But the | alternative is not to have no designer; that is impossible. The | alternative is just that someone else does the design, usually | someone who doesn't even know that is what they're doing, let | alone care. | karaterobot wrote: | This guide should definitely include big sections on user | research, discovery, and validation. These may be left off | because they are thought of as more "product designer" skills, | but what if I told you that distinction is meaningless? In | practice, you'll have to do it even if you don't want to -- but | you should want to, because it's the way to actually make things | good. | runarberg wrote: | I agree, user research is an invaluable skill of a good UI/UX | developer. I guess this is a roadmap, not a guide, and the | author makes a passing mention of it, so I consider that | sufficient. | | As a UI developer, I've never actually learned to conduct user | research (skill that I'm definitely lacking), but during my | time in the industry I've definitely learned to listen to my | graphic designers that actually conduct these research, both to | listen to and materialize their interpretation, and to bring my | own interpretation. As a novice UI/UX developer I for sure had | a lot of biases about user interaction which were deeply | flawed, UI/UX research is a really helpful tool in braking | these biases. | swyx wrote: | this roadmap is very heavy on theory, and geared towards being a | professional designer. | | if you're like me and are mostly a developer who just wants to | get incrementally better at design piece by piece, here's the | roadmap i've been working on for about 3-4 years: | | https://github.com/sw-yx/spark-joy/ | ThomPete wrote: | You teach yourself UI/UX by applying knowledge from outside the | field through design patterns and trial and error to actual | projects. Understand the user data adjust according, rinse | repeat. | | Understand business, understand programming sufficiently, learn | how to understand data, learn how to observe and draw conclusions | based on behavior, understand typography, color theory. | | Avoid anything that says UX theory, design theory, design | thinking, design psychology etc. Whatever relevance they have, | it's already baked into the design patterns. | | The biggest advice I have is find areas that don't have well | established design patterns as that will normally be the areas | you will have the ability to have the biggest impact. | | This is my anecdotal +20 years experience making sure I stayed | relevant. | pazimzadeh wrote: | That's good advice. | | Another one is to put yourself in the user's shoes and then | lean in to your own laziness in order to come up with a UI that | will delight the average user. | | Also, in the beginning don't worry too much about the | difficulty of implementing your ideas. You won't come up with | anything new if you are always thinking "that's too hard" or | "that will take too long." You can always scale back your | ambition at a later time, but it's important to be excited | about your ideas. | | There are a few sites that follow this philosophy: | | http://flyosity.com/design-then-code/ | | https://designcode.io/ | | Edit: | | Oh, and start prototyping the flow way before finalizing colors | and so on. This is a great tool for it: | https://principleformac.com/ | tpmx wrote: | I spent a lot of time on UI/UX design between 2004-2014 at Opera, | the browser company (on the mobile browsers). Finding someone who | was good enough at pixel level graphics design _and_ was capable | of iterating like us software people were used to was insanely | hard, nevermind the complexities of the UI /UX designs. | | I think things have gotten a lot better since then. Now it's | routine to see very well-designed apps (and _sometimes_ even | websites) from even relatively small national /local entitities | that _totally nail_ all three main aspects: GFX /UI & UX (well, | and sometimes even transitions/motion design). It's really | impressive to see how the field has scaled up. I must assume that | the various variants of education are working. (Northern European | context.) | xwowsersx wrote: | Can you share some examples of apps from smaller entities that | you think are well-designed? | tpmx wrote: | Scale is relative. I'm impressed by e.g. these Scandinavian | apps: Postnord (!), Avanza, Hemnet, NRK TV, Instabox. There | are perhaps 300-400 more of roughly equal quality in | Scandinavia. For most of these: the maximum adressable | audience (the population) is 5-10M and they still they reach | a super high level of polish. | krembanan wrote: | I always thought NRK TV was so well done and beautiful, | glad to find someone else that feels the same way :) | devteambravo wrote: | https://skunkworks.ae.studio/ | xwowsersx wrote: | I'm not seeing anything here that makes me think "this is | good design", but maybe I'd need to sign up for each | product. I saw some cute landing pages and some Typeforms. | Were you directing to me to something specific? | devteambravo wrote: | Could you share something that does make you think "this | is good design"? | krm01 wrote: | One thing that helps us (3 person UI UX design team [0]) is to | learn to code and write code for side projects frequently. | | This helped us be more in sync with engineering teams and | allowed us to seemlessly get plugged into teams of Google | engineers, Startups etc. | | [0] https://fairpixels.pro | simulo wrote: | I find coding to be a useful skill when collaborating with | developers and for writing my own prototypes, but it is not | very valuable for getting jobs as it is rarely a required | skill. | andirk wrote: | Encourage your designer friends to understand the constraints | of HTML and CSS. Without that understanding, the ouput from | the design team often looks more like print media. | karaterobot wrote: | Speaking as a former developer, current designer, I agree | that all designers should have some familiarity with the | medium they're working in, in addition to the domain they're | working in. An industrial designer should learn something | about fabrication and manufacturing, and a software designer | should learn to code. They don't have to become experts, but | ignoring such an enormous aspect of your field for your | entire career would be a missed opportunity. I hesitate to | call it irresponsible, but to be candid that's personally | that's how I view it. Call it an invaluable benefit. | chiefalchemist wrote: | I like to say, design without consideration for | manufacturing is art. In the context of business, design is | not a tool for doing art. | samsolomon wrote: | I think the more overlap in understanding--better delivery | teams perform. That doesn't mean product designers are | writing production code or engineers are tweaking designs. | But it does mean that designers understand limitations and | consistency, while engineers understand what the general | experience should feel like. I think that leads to a pretty | tight feedback loop where things can be iterated on quickly | and there's not a lot of noise with arguing about what's | possible or not. | Mezzie wrote: | The main problem is that anyone who can do both is highly | incentivized to go into engineering/coding instead of | product design. The pay and respect are usually much | better. So then that pool is limited further to people who | can design and code well, prefer design, and don't | need/want extra money. | | Then add on to that our current work culture prefers | specialists to generalists: HR and exec teams will hire a | product designer with 5 years of design experience and no | coding over someone with 2 years of design experience _and_ | 5 years of software engineering experience. | Foreignborn wrote: | I don't find this to be the case. I'm a senior designer | at a FAANG and chose this over being a SWE. And nowadays, | the salaries are very competitive between pm, design and | eng. | | When I was earlier in my career it was a major struggle | to stop coding. every place out of university would say | there was some kind of design opportunity for me, but | then I'd find myself implementing mine and other | designers features. I'm glad that's over. | | Anecdotally, I've met several eng -> PM and Eng -> design | transfers, probably all possible to the leveling of pay | and prestige. | Mezzie wrote: | I stand corrected! Thanks. | magicalhippo wrote: | This applies for most things though. For example, when I | got hired at my current place, I didn't know anything about | the domain. The more I've learned about the domain the | better code I write. Knowing the domain allows me to make | informed decisions, discover potential issues etc, rather | than just blindly follow some spec. | krm01 wrote: | Exactly this | ethbr0 wrote: | Bingo. The most effective PMs / designers / managers I've | worked with as a software engineer spent their energy | learning high level technical limitations. What's order-of- | magnitude easier; what's harder. | | It's difficult to learn because it's experience-based | listening and intuiting, without any books that I know of, | but it provided a greater boost to team productivity than | their learning nuts-and-bolts details. | 12thwonder wrote: | Most of the UI/UX designers that I see at work and other places | are basically graphics designers. I just wish UI designers learn | more about interaction design than just pure graphics design. | chiefalchemist wrote: | The same applies to web design. Using Photoshop to create an | image that looks like a website doesn't make someone a web | designer, any more than creating an image that looks like a | house would make them an architect. | cmrdporcupine wrote: | Unfortunately it seems like most staffing departments seem to | think that this is what UX _is_. Often where you 'd see "web | designer" or "graphic designer" before, it's been renamed to | "UX designer" and the emphasis is really on visual appeal or | ability to toss together web pages etc. rather than on the | skill of information architecture, usability flows, user | research etc. For some people there's an overlap in these | skills, but not for all people. | | My wife is trained in UX research and UX/UI design and is | trying to break back into the job market after years of being | out (kids, sick mother, school, etc.) and although she had a | background in some graphic design (and marketing and content) | years ago, she doesn't feel confident-in or want to emphasise | on graphic design and doesn't have an up to date portfolio of | that kind of thing. And what she is finding is almost all the | positions titled "UX Designer" are really just "web design" or | "graphic designer" with a fancy new title, and they won't look | at her, really. | | The few times that I've done front end work I've always found | it frustrating how the UX people I worked with seemed more | concerned right up-front with pixel padding and font choices | and colours and animations and logos than with getting the | initial storyboard and low fidelity mockups right first. | | TLDR; most shops hiring "UX designer" are really wanting to | hire graphic designers and pixel slingers. | | P.S. if you know of anybody hiring (remote, full or part time | or freelance) for UX research, content design, information | architecture, and so on and who wants a mature and | conscientious worker with past professional experience in the | tech sector... ping me at ryan . daum @ gmail.com | Hnaomyiph wrote: | It's funny because I went to school for computer science, I | grew up doing graphic design, and have a lot of experience | having done a lot of work in both departments, but never a | strict UI/UX role. When I tried to apply for UI/UX positions I | either never heard back, or was told time and time again that I | was lacking specific UI/UX experience. | | Thought it was always funny, I guess hiring managers don't see | the overlap the same way I do. | sarchertech wrote: | I took a few elective Human Computer Interaction classes in | undergrad and grad school. I have never seen a company pay more | than lip service to doing actual UI design. | | I generally work with graphic designers who made the switch to | calling themselves UI/UX designers because the realized it paid | more. They're much better than me at understanding composition, | fonts, colors, visual hierarchy etc..., but they don't know | much at all about actually designing interactive UI. | | In many cases the designers are the first people to work on | engineering the product and they aren't equipped for this work | at all. | DrewADesign wrote: | Conversely, many of the developers I came across in design | firms were cargo cult coders who got jobs because they very | confidently presented their mediocre-at-best development | capabilities as plausible to non-technical people. In fact, | they likely didn't even know they weren't great because they | generally completed the simple tasks they were given and the | people evaluating their work knew less than they did. Not | knowing enough to a hire and direct qualified staff is a | management problem, not a problem with the field. | | TBH, the overwhelming majority of developers assume they know a | _lot_ more about UI, UX and visual design work than they | actually do... I 'm continually shocked by how many think | bringing in a UX person to add visual polish to an otherwise | complete product in any way makes sense. In software dev | environments, they necessarily have a lot of say in who gets | hired. If you're not clear on who does what in the design | business, you get people with shiny portfolios of app UI | screens assembled in Photoshop to do your "UX" if there's | enough time and budget left for the "extra" sprint. | gsmo wrote: | Just to add to this (copied from other branch) | | The challenge the profession currently faces is that a lot of | people go into it for the wrong reasons and who are not suited | for it. Because there is no money in traditional graphic | design, many graphic designers elect UX thinking it's nearly a | 1:1 transfer. There is a lot of mis-match. | | You really have to really like and have a good sense of human | cognition and human factors first and foremost. You also have | to like thinking in systems. You are basically design | (engineering) solutions for how humans interact with computing | in all its forms and in many modes. | | Many designers, whether they admit it to themselves or to | others, would really rather be designing book covers and | concert posters. | Mezzie wrote: | And the people who ARE interested in those get less far | because we don't have as many shiny things to show off to HR | to get an interview in the first place. | umutcnkus wrote: | Do you think investing to learn UI/UX design worth the effort for | a frontend developer, besides personel fun? | astral303 wrote: | One could write a whole book about great UX using only interfaces | in ncurses/text mode. (Edited: I missed a section on | UX/research). | snide wrote: | Read the entire document. There's a big section on UX and | Research. | [deleted] | pier25 wrote: | This is cool but, like anything, practice is far more important | than theory. | | There are tons of websites that give you fake briefings and | challenges to practice on: | | https://uxtools.co/challenges/ | | https://fakeclients.com/ui | swyx wrote: | few more: | | - https://www.frontendpractice.com/ - https://www.codewell.cc/ | - https://cssbattle.dev/ | | my full list https://github.com/sw-yx/spark-joy | testcase_delta wrote: | Thanks for sharing these! | hizxy wrote: | This is why we have bad software | klysm wrote: | Care to elaborate? | gsmo wrote: | The challenge the profession currently faces is that a lot of | people go into it for the wrong reasons and who are not suited | for it. Because there is no money in traditional graphic | design, many graphic designers elect UX thinking it's nearly a | 1:1 transfer. There is a lot of mis-match. | | You really have to really like and have a good sense of human | cognition and human factors first and foremost. You also have | to like thinking in systems. You are basically design | (engineering) solutions for how humans interact with computing | in all its forms and in many modes. | | Many designers, whether they admit it to themselves or to | others, would really rather be designing book covers and | concert posters. | 0xb0565e487 wrote: | I can't read this they want me to sign up, but it looks | interesting. | EarthIsHome wrote: | https://archive.ph/ry2Kc | [deleted] | tiffanyh wrote: | Copywriting is design. | | Many of the examples are for web design however not once does it | talk about copywriting. It goes way under appreciated but | copywriting is also design (i.e. # of words you write effects UI | layout in massive ways). | gopher_space wrote: | My biggest fear as a developer is that I'm unaware of something | that's obvious to a domain right next to mine. I love seeing | people break down their work like in this article, and I wish I | had a way to add comments like yours to the model and see | other's thoughts on where and why it fits in. | partlysean wrote: | Completely agree. Content Designers should be part of the | conversation just as early as Product Designers and | Researchers. | karaterobot wrote: | Earlier, if you ask me. Content should be an input to design. | seanwilson wrote: | > (i.e. # of words you write effects UI layout in massive ways) | | Yep. Does anybody work with dedicated copywriters and dedicated | UI designers who don't do copy? What's the general process? | | I find the UI design and copywriting has to be done iteratively | because they're interdependent and require experimentation to | find the right balance. For example, sometimes there's a tricky | layout situation that can be solved by just changing the length | of the copy. Same goes for development, sometimes it can be | easier to modify the UI slightly to make it more practical to | implement e.g. some responsive design coding can get really | complex if you're not leaning into what the browser lets you do | easily with flexbox/grid. | | Work goes a lot smoother with better results when each team has | some flexibility and collaborate in an iteratively way vs | thinking they can handover their part and have it followed | without any tweaks. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-10-01 23:00 UTC)