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Ask HN: How to learn UI/UX as a data/BE engineer?

39 points thenaturalist | 5 comments | 21 Oct 24 15:22 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source

Hi HN,

coming from a data/ BE background I feel extremely familiar with reasoning about systems and performance from the cloud-infra to the pipeline stack level. Or I'm super familiar with data visualization.

I feel like falling off a cliff when trying to extrapolate that knowledge to the more customer-facing world.

Despite having some tool ideas in the past, I realized I shy away from going towards the front end because I really lack any conecptual frame of how to think about and subsequently implement UI or UX.

I don't mean that in a nitty-gritty-designer focussed way but more like first-principle understanding:

What makes a good color scheme?

What makes a great wording and why?

What's a good form of presenting information?

I feel like I can recognize good UI/UX when I see it (as is often the case with HN company LPs), but I'd totally fail at distilling check boxes that such good examples tick.

Any pointers to how I can learn about these worlds and develop an understanding of what principles UI/UX should follow?

1. austin-cheney ◴[21 Oct 24 18:29 UTC] No.41906937[source]▶
Design and usability are skills that take years of practice to mature. Its something vaguely akin to interior design. To learn that I would recommend reading books about visual design and taking art classes.

To start you need to learn how the code works. But about the code you must first make a very deliberate decision:

* Do you want to learn this for yourself?

* Or, are you looking for employment?

If the goal is employment then if you have a Java background learn Angular, otherwise learn React. They are massive frameworks, so its really just a matter of using the world's largest tools to put text on screen. Watch videos online. Be prepared for a lot of boring instruction that feels like copy/paste.

If the goal is to learn this just for your own personal use then don't even bother with the framework nonsense. Its an inch deep just to people under-qualified people into the workforce and will become all consuming. Instead learn the event model for interaction, accessibility for how to write the markup, CSS how to make it pretty, and the DOM for how all this works together. Its more complicated than it sounds to get started, but once you achieve the smallest level of comfort its astonishingly faster to learn than the framework nonsense, because the framework nonsense is much larger than the things it layers over.

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2. changing1999 ◴[21 Oct 24 19:07 UTC] No.41907319[source]▶
The least effective FE engineers I worked with (big tech) are people who learned client-side tech by learning React. They have a very limited understanding of UI concepts and an insufficient attention to detail.

React is arguably more about encapsulation, data flow, and state than about the fundamentals of UI and UX.

replies(1): >>41907844 #
3. austin-cheney ◴[21 Oct 24 19:52 UTC] No.41907844[source]▶
Agreed, but employment in software is not about effectiveness. Its about conformity. That is why the decision is a forced dichotomy.
replies(1): >>41908032 #
4. changing1999 ◴[21 Oct 24 20:12 UTC] No.41908032{3}[source]▶
That's an overly pessimistic view. Both professional and personal growth depend on effectiveness. Even conformity doesn't exclude it. You can conform better by being more effective.
replies(1): >>41908698 #
5. austin-cheney ◴[21 Oct 24 21:29 UTC] No.41908698{4}[source]▶
What if instead it were about shifting direction in favor of what is deterministic in response to numeric measures? For example instead of doing what feels comfortable as necessary to lower the perceived cost of hiring/training what if the focus were on building things that execute faster, achieve superior accessibility, or lower the cost to refactor according to automated analysis? Excellence is exclusive to those who wish to achieve it while conformity is the opposite.