Good UX Material Online?

Hello everyone,

Some may recall my Devember 2018 project here.

Basically, it was my first attempt at building a web-based GUI for a Twitch bot program. It runs locally, but I wanted to make it user friendly past the CLI implementation when the devember project started. It uses React.

However I feel I am severely lacking in the UX front in terms of training, practice that sort of thing, I am saying this as someone who is not an artist.

Does anyone have any good suggestions for material such as websites, videos etc that you’ve found useful for creating better UX and GUI designs?

Thanks!

I feel like UX is kind of a weird field… it’s really just finding the most common sense solution to a communication problem. (ie: “How do I communicate that X thing is clickable? How do I communicate that they should fill out Y field first?”) But as they say, common sense isn’t always that common.

I think a good starting point is finding exemplars of UX you like, and taking notes about what they did well and what they didn’t do well. This can be for anything, even stuff not related to your particular project. I’ve made notes for myself about ordering kiosks, the opening directions of doors, twitch’s ‘follow’ interface, online web forms, all kinds of stuff.

Build up a library in your head of stuff that ‘just works’, and analyze WHY it works. Think about why things were designed the way they were. For example, if you changed something about the workflow, would it still work as well-- could you add a button, remove a step, and still communicate the same message? Would it still appeal to the target audience? Can you think of a way to shorten the workflow and still get the user through everything smoothly? Making notes for yourself like that is invaluable and will help you gain a lot of insight into why things are designed the way they are.

I really like this site as a reference for basic UX:

I also did a video on this a while back:

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As you seem to elude to, I’ll be needing to approach this a little differently than I would for software programming. Seems exciting though.

Thank you for the information, I really appreciate it!