This is a developer's introduction to designing good user experience (UX). Written by a developer for developers.
This "guide" is still very much a work-in-progress.
Although this was originally just a list of resources for my DjangoCon tutorial "Designing Good User Experience" (slides), I wanted to make it useful for other developers as well. What you'll find here are some basics that every developer should know.
UX is something that is very often overlooked or ignored in the development process. It either gets no attention or is approached in an inefficient way that doesn't produce any useful results. I am not sure why that is, but I assume it stems from two main reasons. Either developers think it's not a crucial part of their product or they don't have the right knowledge/resources.
Every software/product/app you build is going to be used by someone. If not directly, it will still be interected with in one way or another. Making sure that it can actually be used as you imagined is a crucial part of any development process. Your app/product can have killer features, but if they are unusable, it doesn't matter at all. So having some basic sense for developing UX is a necessary skill for any developer. And while designing great UX takes a lot of time, effort and money, designing pretty good UX is actually quite easy. And that's what this guide is for - teaching you how to start designing good UX.
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