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Comment by nomilk | Hacker News Reader

For any complete design noobs, like myself, I asked HN for a crash courses in design, and the top recommendation was Refactoring UI by Adam Wathan and Steve Schoger.

I studied that ebook over 5 days (it would be possible to read in 1 day), took notes, and found it a delight to read and incredibly unpretentious (sophisticated ideas are conveyed in simple side-by-side comparisons of right vs wrong ways to do things).

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31889958

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I recently paid for Refactoring UI, after the rave "reviews" it's getting on HN, but was quite disappointed to find that it's mostly about design in general and doesn't have a lot to say about design problems that are specific to UI and nothing at all that takes into account the time axis of interaction design. I pretty much knew all of this stuff already from having read a much cheaper introductory book on visual design that was written with print in mind.

I'm also a bit displeased that "UI" seems to mean "webpage" these days (not even SPAs, but just laying out hypertext and graphics on a screen), whereas I always considered that to be a special case of UI that's so trivial that it almost needs to be thought of as a "degenerate" special case. It used to be called "web design" but that's probably too 90s and wouldn't sell books nowadays. I actually wanted to learn about desktop GUIs, making this wholly the wrong book for me.

I self-taught those principles decades ago with "About Face 2.0", "The Design of Everyday Things" and "Don't Make Me Think". Though old, I know they provide solid principles because I still find them relevant today.

These come from an era before HCI was a professional discipline taught in schools. I suspect newer books don't teach these general principles because they take for granted that a professional will have learned them already through their formal training, so they can focus on specifics.

https://www.amazon.com/About-Face-2-0-Essentials-Interaction...

https://www.amazon.com/-/es/Don-Norman/dp/0465050654/ref=pd_...

https://www.amazon.com/-/es/Steve-Krug/dp/0321965515/ref=pd_...

I thought the OP was great, and am also a fan of Refactoring UI.

What's the "next level" from these handy rules of thumb? I'm looking for a UI 201

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