What topics are good for a UI/UX Primer?

The best resources I know are these two video lectures [1][2] from MIT's 2018 6.170 course [3]. They consist of a set of heuristics that summarize the best of decades of UI/UX research, very well presented by Professor Daniel Jackson.

There is also the deeper MIT's 6.813 " User Interface Design & Implementation" [4]

[1] https://drive.google.com/file/d/1qblmdoZIJQ4rYGgCPLNusEn2yWi...

[2] https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Cvco6r8a6oV3Sy89RKdIfrZCrGi...

[3] https://stellar.mit.edu/S/course/6/fa18/6.170/materials.html

[4] http://web.mit.edu/6.813/www/sp18/

Don't have any good resources unfortunately but I've seen my share of UI/UX people who are plenty good at creating "beautiful" UIs which end up being giant unusable pieces of crap. So I would place a whole lot of emphasis on understanding the user first. What kind of device will the user be interacting with your UI on? Where will they be? What does their existing workflow look like? Some of this overlaps with the field of human factors and ergonomics, which very few in the industry have even heard of.

I would also include a chapter on accessibility. I've been unfortunate enough to have worked with UI people who genuinely didn't give a crap about it. And they'd even get defensive about stuff around colour blindness, attempting to justify their bad choices through poorly made assumptions about the end user (see paragraph one). That's just one small part. I could rant and rave for hours about screen readers, the size of text and fonts.

Copywriting.

I rarely see it ever mentioned in UI/UX but Copywriting has the single biggest factor in UI/UX.

The number of words you write, what you write, and information hierarchy has massive impact on page layout which then ultimately changes the design of the page.

You could be like Yahoo back in the day and have an information hierchacy literally coprywritten onto the page.

https://www.versionmuseum.com/history-of/yahoo-website

Or you could be like Google, and only have a search box.

https://www.versionmuseum.com/history-of/google-search

Take a close look at Inside Macintosh. Volume 1 if memory serves.

One thing I do recall is that a menu should be +/- 7 menu items. The reasoning is that people can remember about seven things.

Default buttons (ok/cancel) should always be non-destructive. You don’t want your default button to delete a file, for instance. The reasoning is that users will hit return by default on a dialog box.

The most important thing I’ve learnt over the years is workflow. Build your UI by having actual users use it and critique it. As an example, if you’re filling a form or table in, move to the next cell/field when they hit tab or return. That’s one thing that makes an application good versus useable.

Apple's Human Interface Guidelines

https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...

The Windows Interface Guidelines - A Guide for Designing Software (pdf 1995) (as @andai mentioned)

https://www.ics.uci.edu/~kobsa/courses/ICS104/course-notes/M...

User Interface Design For Programmers (as @mmmm2 mentioned)

The cable modem example is one of my favorites

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/10/24/user-interface-des...

--- Topics:

Guidelines for Checkboxes

https://blog.uidrafter.com/guidelines-for-checkboxes

Radio Buttons vs Dropdowns

https://blog.uidrafter.com/radio-buttons-vs-dropdowns

Lots of great stuff in https://www.refactoringui.com

Basically the 10 topics from here: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/government-design-principles#sta...

Start with user needs, Do less, Design with data, Do the hard work to make it simple, Iterate. Then iterate again, This is for everyone, Understand context, Build digital services, not websites, Be consistent, not uniform, Make things open: it makes things better.

https://www.refactoringui.com/ is a great resource for practical UI design concepts.

My favourite books on design, both fundamental and UI/UX specifically:

- Universal Principles of Design

- The Design of Everyday Things

- Don't Make me Think

- Rocket Surgery Made Easy

- Defensive Design for the Web

- Forms that Work

User Interface Design for Programmers (by Joel Spolsky) is pretty good. I think it's available for free at this point: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/10/24/user-interface-des...

It covers some foundational ideas of what makes a good interface.

Nielsen/Norman. No other resource quoted here comes even close to distilling important first principles and citing research to back it up.

Bonus Round: "100 things" series by Dr. Weinschenk and coglode.com maybe after you finish N/N.

This is a good list.

One thing I've seen junior UI/UX people struggle with is preparing their designs to be understood by other people. That could be stakeholders, yes, but I'm thinking of the developers tasked with using them to implement the feature.

Teaching this could touch on softer communications topics: how and when to run a meeting, or give a demo, or ask for feedback. But, I'm also thinking specifically about things like annotating and redlining designs to focus engineers on the important parts, and reduce ambiguity. Also, how to write stories in (e.g.) Jira and document components in (e.g.) Figma.

Even just "how to keep a tidy design canvas, knowing other people are going to be poking around in there, and will rely on it not being a chaotic pigsty"

Another thing to think about: what skills differentiate a successful designer working in a remote, asynchronous environment, versus one working in a traditional office? In my view, it's important to spend even more time gathering clear requirements, and document everything (especially decisions, risks, questions, and so on) in a public way.

Refactoring UI is by the authors of tailwind css. Definitely helped me a lot.

This is my recommended reading list for UI/UX, books that changed the way I think about design and user interfaces:

The Design of Everyday Things, Donald Norman

The Humane Interface, Jef Raskin

Everything by Edward Tufte

The Windows Interface Guidelines are quite comprehensive. Appendix C (p. 361) is a bullet ppint summary of the design principles.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36469181

webOS was miles ahead of the competition when it came out in terms of UX, and its innovations are still present in iOS and Android today.

Jeremy Lyon gave a very good 101 explanation about the concepts and thought process:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SEwCRpTEgA0

I would say start getting deep into Figma. Watch their tutorials and some of the keynotes and you’ll not only learn the important parts of theory, you’ll learn what people do in practice.

I would think that spending time watching videos and playing with Figma would be infinitely more valuable than reading a book. Not only that, it’s funner. Read the book afterwards because by then you’ll have questions in your mind and books can help to fill those holes.

Also, Figma is completely free for students and teachers.

Great stuff (proven by actual-use-in-practice): https://uxqb.org/en/ Especially (from tab "Documents"): https://uxqb.org/public/documents/CPUX-F_EN_Curriculum.pdf

Where there are existing standards:

* Windows, Mac, iOS, Android, KDE, Gnome, etc... all have existing human interface guidelines, and those should be respected if you are making software for those platforms.

* For the web, PWAs and electron-ish apps, I'd love to see guidelines that help developers understand where you should not go: i.e. disable zoom, left-click, etc... and then jump into the usual discussion about layout, widgets and so on.

A revelation for me happened back in 2010. I was working on a mobile app for a festival and trying to research the best UI. I saw the quote "A cheeseburger is an intuitive interface. It shows you how to eat it with the wrapper and arrangement." I started to watch people use every day interfaces. Gas pumps, self-checkout kiosks, ATMs, signage and number taking at the DMV, Facebook on phones, car radios, drink dispensers, restaurant menus, bus ticket terminals. Even the simplest interface can cause complete confusion. Adding any kind of advertising or screen motion makes it worse. That's not a specific book or website recommendation, but my whole process changed because of that new approach. I still observe these things, especially with al ubiquity of touchscreens in modern life. Way more helpful and practical than what I read.

I’d bump Localisation and Internationalisation higher that just subtopics, because it is such a cross-cutting concern. Cultural differences, algorithmic differences like number/date formatting, sorting orders, but also design differences like longer text or RTL.

Found this post insightful on the topic: https://blog.mobile-patterns.com/practical-ux-design-tips-fo...

I would point you to the excellent book “The Design of Everyday Things”, and “Don’t make me think”.

The Object Oriented UX approach defined and evangelized by Sophia Prater is an excellent starting point for organizing complex problems:

https://www.ooux.com/

Check out these syllabi/ebooks, lots of focus on history of UI/UX and foundational patterns:

https://faculty.washington.edu/ajko/books/user-interface-sof...

http://faculty.washington.edu/ajko/books/foundations-of-info...

I've heard good things about IxDF and had it recommended to me by UX designers. I started taking this UX beginners guide course on their site. They have an annual membership you need to subscribe to that gets you access to their entire course library and their community.

https://www.interaction-design.org/courses/user-experience-t...

Your markdown is messed up:

User Interface (UI)](user-interface) + [benefits

The book “The Non-Designers Design Book” is very good. This is where the acronym CRAP comes from, which is Contrast, Repetition, Alignment, and Proximity.

I'm a big fan of Kathy Sierra's "Badass: Making Users Awesome" [1]

Less about UI but really focused on what users feel and how they experience what you build.

1. https://www.amazon.com/Badass-Making-Awesome-Kathy-Sierra/dp...

I liked Cadence & Slang:

https://cadence.cc/

Steve Krug's Don't make me think is one of the best resources on UI/UX https://sensible.com/dont-make-me-think/ I would put on the book recommendation list for a UI/UX Primer

Accessibility. All UI/UX is about making computers accessible to humans so start with A11Y basics. Once you've got those down, and your software is accessible to as many people as possible, then refine and shape and craft to create something that's got your distinct voice.

Have everyone skim "Don't Make Me Think" and go from there.

https://www.amazon.com/Dont-Make-Think-Revisited-Usability/d...

A lot of the text reads like it was written by ChatGPT. Probably was, no?

How to write UX Documentation for the user and for the developer is missing. Commenting code. Testing seems light also, what about record/playback testing? Code coverage testing?

You should check out this previous post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27210022

Probably should start with ISO 9241-220:2019 Ergonomics of human-system interaction

* don’t make me think * refactoring UI * rocket surgery

Make sure to cover text-to-speech and speech-to-text, as they become increasingly important.

Start with Google and apples design process. Really standing on the shoulders of giants.

Ethical design practices anyone?

Sketching and talking to customers.

https://hackdesign.org/

Papercuts!