I recently finished the book "The Joy of UX: User Experience and Interactive Design for Developers" by David Platt. I recommend it to anyone looking to make better software. You can buy it at Amazon, or if you have an O'Reilly learning account, you can read it "for free."
When a lot of people hear design (myself included), their first thought is about the look and feel of the front end. Things like which typefaces and color schemes I should use to make the front end easy on the eyes. While that is important for having a polished and professional-looking product, that is not the subject of this book.
The main idea I got from the book is that developers are not the primary users of the systems that we create (unless you are building an IDE or dev tools). The experience of using our software suffers due to our bias as developers. Improving the experience helps our apps get out of the way of our customers and let them accomplish their goals. Doing so makes them happier, and in turn, helps our bottom line.
In the book, David lays out the main principles of good user experience and backs them up with concrete examples from real websites and systems to make the principles relatable. I am not going to re-hash all the tenets and tidbits from the book, but here are the ones that stuck with me:
- Start with reasonable defaults
- Don't make your users think or do your work
- Lead the witness
If this topic interests you, I also recommend the work the UX Design for Developers course on LinkedIn learning by Billy Hollis.
If you have a resource for this topic that you recommend, please share it below.
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