Hacker News Reader

Comment by iamunr | Hacker News Reader

Just came out yesterday, doesn't necessarily teach 'from scratch' UI, but a great aide.

This is to UX/IxD literature what „just add water“ meals are to cooking. A collection of patterns you can copy. To really make it worth while you‘d have to look behind the presented patterns and ask why they work (and when they won‘t). This, you can also do by looking at real products in the wild.

For $249 (fake price anchor, I know) you can get all the classics from Tufte, Cooper and Norman, a bookshelve and a stool to sit your behind down and study first principles.

There is room for both and I’m sure you can find a lot of value in the applied examples as well, but at $249 RSP I would not recommend it.

While I agree with your analogy, it is entirely possible to sink an inordinate amount of time into learning design theory with those books, and have absolutely nothing to show for it in terms of a real world website that reflects good design principles in a way that is apparent to the average web user.

I've read "The Design of Everyday Things"; I appreciate its role in providing a kind of philosophical grounding for HCI education. But if I were building product to compete in the same space as Robinhood, or Airbnb, that book wouldn't tell me a damn thing about how to design a UI that engages users. And increasingly, a lot of "engagement" comes down to whether or not the app "feels" like a premium experience.

Unfortunately that feeling isn't something you can recreate by reading about the circumstances in which a door would be designed to be push or pull based.

I don’t disagree, but I will add that copying proven patterns without an understanding of the core mechanics will only carry you for a short distance.

Very similar to how one could be very productive by glueing together stackoverflow snippets and random 3rd party modules for a while, but once the first tough problem arises it is a lost cause.

With code that is usually tangible in form of a bug or performance issue.

With design, it might still tick all the „look and feel“ boxes and yet be utterly broken.

„The design of everday things“ is often recommended because it is so relatable even for readers with no expertise in the field. This is not to say that reading it is sufficient to make you a capable designer.

I saw this advertised on product hunt. Apparently it's a good thing that you can read it in 1.5hrs. Maybe but not with a $79 price tag for a PDF.

The amount of value I got out of reading this PDF will far exceed $79.

I'm mostly a backend guy who does the Bootstrap thing. The techniques and examples in the content are gold for someone like me.

It's more of a reference book so you continue earning back that investment over time.

You can get a lot of his tips for free here in this curated Twitter Moment: https://twitter.com/i/moments/880688233641848832

I'd happily pay $79 for original content _in print_ that delves into why each of those tips works the way they do (you can connect each of those tips to fundamental principles of design, for example).

But for a compilation of tweets in a PDF? There are renowned books that go for less than that. I got 3 hard back volumes of Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming for around £70. Is this book of that caliber?

And, what do other design professionals say about it? From a quick perusal of their material, accessibility seems missing from it (e.g. contrasts, designing to work with assistive technology etc)

I am interested because I find design books to be too theoretical, and at the end I'm left thinking "Yes and..?". I need practical examples. I think I would get $79 of value, but it would also last for 12 months before the content dates.

I'm reticent to pay $150 dollars for a PDF without a print copy.

Yup, I was excited about the book, and then I saw it was PDF only.

One of my favorite books as a "hobbyist" web dev (my real job is in reporting and analytics) is Jon Duckett's HTML/CSS and JavaScript/Jquery books. Gorgeously designed ink-and-paper books that give you a truly visual understanding of the box model, floats, functions, loops etc. The combination of visual design and easy-to-understand examples make the book a constant reference for me.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com