I would start with the classic: Don't Make Me Think by Steve Krug
this post was submitted on 06 Apr 2024
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Asklemmy
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The Design of Everyday Things
https://www.amazon.com/Design-Everyday-Things-Revised-Expanded/dp/0465050654
Indeed, this book is an excellent starting point and it's a little disappointing it's not upvoted further simply because it isn't aimed at Graphical User Interface. It's still about how people think things work, and how to make them work how people think they work.
I think that's what is learnt on Design courses at university. Also ergonomics.
But IDK. I saw "professional" web-designers who don't consider colorblind peoples in their colors.
But I didn't ask if they had professional education.
This is one of the best/most effective UI courses I've seen that takes someone from 0 to very good. It's quite expensive though.
UI design is increadibly complex.
A UI isn't just an app, or a program running on a screen, everything man has built to interact with by others have a UI, from simple tools cutlery, to complex industrial control systems.
UI design has a very simple goal, "simplify usage", from the shape of the handle of a knife to a color coded matrix of indicator lights at an industrial monitoring system, it all comes down to "simplify".
Unfortunately there are just so many, many different needs of the person interacting with different systems that there are very few exact rules to follow.
You mention apps, so let's limit outselves to software...
The first question that the UI designer needs to know is "what should the UI allow the user to do".
It could be as simple as "register a smartphone when issuing the phone to a user".
This means the UI needs to accept input of six pecies of data:
- Manufacturer of the phone
- Model of the phone
- IMEI number of the phone
- Name of the user
- Date
- Name of the person issuing the phone
Ok not that bad, so you make this, but then you quickly realize that the user of the system needs a way to check if the phone was added to the system correctly.
If this is just added in Excel, then it is a solved problem, but if you are building a completely new system, then you need to add a way to get a list of all phones issued in the system to the UI, you also need to add a way to update posts in the list.
Then you realize you it would be very helpful to have a way to see the actual status of phones in the system, there will be times to log if a phone is sent for service or if it gets stolen or so, so you add a status field.
After a few months of accumulating data, the list looks good, if a bit messy, you can't get a good overview of it.
So you add color coding to the status field, white for in storage, green for in production, yellow for on service, red for lost/stolen, grey for retired.
You have now a functioning UI.
Google for “Material Design Spec” for a super highly opinionated, highly-arbitrary, but still kind of interesting intro to UI standards.
Its incredibly cultural actually so there is no universal solution. Asian cultures tend to be able to and prefer having a higher density and more information compared to western world. Americans require more simplification than everyone else for some reason I recon iq.