Ask HN: How to keep up on research relevant to HCI and Product Design? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How to keep up on research relevant to HCI and Product Design?

9 pointschrisdevereux4 comments

After reading Alex Krupp's excellent article[1] and ProblemFactory's comment

    If a developer needs a balanced binary tree, they will first look for an existing implementation in the language they are using. 
    If one doesn't exist, a good developer will check Knuth/CLRS/Wikipedia for the suitable algorithms and build it based on these recommendations, instead of jumping in and hacking something together on the spot.

I became suddenly aware that most of my product and UX design is based basically on intuition, spontaneous ideas and trial-and-error.

Like many people here, I'm mostly a programmer who dabbles in design for my own projects. I'd love to get more familiar with academic work from HCI and Psychology that's relevant to this. Can anyone recommend some resources (web, people, journals, papers, etc.) that would be worth reading or following to keep up with this stuff? An overview of the relevant fields would be even better.

[1]: http://alexkrupp.typepad.com/sensemaking/2014/06/the-most-important-tech-job-that-doesnt-actually-exist.html

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7861689

I do a lot of random reading, often via searching for a conference (SIGCHI, UIST, etc.) rather than a topic. If you can find a full proceedings list with titles to skim over, it can give you an interesting view year-to-year.

But speaking to the problem of intuition and seat-of-pants methodology:

Reading research publications is often a habit of successful professionals, but it really doesn't do much to give you a solid grasp of research methods because they typically say nothing about why they chose the methods they did, or why they didn't choose other methods, or what flaws there may have been in methods you previously made up off the cuff or pulled out of an article somewhere.

The best way, bar none, to deal with that is to be an active part of a community of people who are at or above (mostly above) your experience level. Immersion in a community with superior experience gives you a constant stream of professional growth. For academics and grad students, they have an existing framework that is largely dedicated to providing that, and through many routes in parallel (their department, conferences, weekly seminars with visiting speakers, teaching).

In industry, you're often the one person in the company, or one of 2-3 people, who even has anything to say about the whole "UI is not UX" issue. And reading will help, socializing on social media etc. will help, but you also have to make an effort to talk shop with other professionals on a regular basis, who are at or preferably above your skill level.

Meetups can help, to the extent that people who know more than you are there, and that you actually talk shop (pound for pound, you may find more misinformation & marketing). If you're near a university with a decent program in this area, you can also poach their meetups. Go to seminars or whatever, it's not like they'll usually check ID, just don't be disruptive and you're fine. Some are explicitly open access, which you should be taking advantage of whenever possible.

Basically, "don't be the smartest person in the room."

If you're not growing, either find or make a new room that has people above your skill level in it. Then interact with them, about professional issues, and be prepared to put your ego aside.

Thanks for the advice and references. Some great starting points there. I hadn't thought of checking out local universities, but will definitely try to do that!

I've found this essay eye opening for UX design http://worrydream.com/MagicInk/

CHI is a decent confernce where work is published chi2014.acm.org/

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