I get asked this a lot. “What are the best UX books to read?”
In true UX tradition my answer is depends.
It depends on your experience as a UX practitioner, your experience with scientific research methods, psychology, interaction design, user interface design, product or visual design and your level of communication skills.
Still having a list of starter books would be handy.
Yeah sure others have their lists from the likes of Will Evans, Paul Seys and Nick Finck however some of the books on these are either too complex (for someone new to UX) or take way to long to get to the point. Bit like this post.
When you use an interface it’s the little things that help make it either a pain or just outstanding.
Sadly, too often we have to put up with the bad interfaces.
In light of this I will from time to time be producing a few articles focusing on specifics of bad interface design and implementation practices.
First one off the ranks is date fields and calendar pickers.
This interface element never really seems to work the way you want it to. Making the overall experience very frustrating.
Bankwest * – a local Western Australian centric bank, that has recently redesigned it’s web site. Now the interesting thing with Bankwest is that they have been slowly over time improving their site with each redesign. Making the site more customer focused and less about the bank, more about people.
This most recent redesign seems to have taken that last final leap towards a customer centric service, leaving the stuffy old school bank image behind.
There is no doubt content is important, no doubt it’s in fact more important than any design. It’s the primary thing that people come to a website for – the content.
So you would expect new sites to come out with perfect content.
Well we know it’s not the way, still we have websites with crap content.
All the other boxes are ticked, the design just works perfectly, there is a distinct visual experience when you arrive on the site. Even the information structure and labeling allows you to get to the right information.
