←back to thread

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

39 points thenaturalist | 1 comments | 21 Oct 24 15:22 UTC | HN request time: 0.338s | 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. changing1999 ◴[21 Oct 24 19:02 UTC] No.41907272[source]▶
I highly recommend to start by building a very simple website from scratch using HTML and CSS.

It's very common today for FE engineers to have a very limited understanding of the basics because they picked up client-side tech by following React tutorials (or any other highly abstracted framework).

It's a very incremental learning process, so expect your brain to take some time to learn to identify small details that make great UI/UX. It takes practice!

Once you feel comfortable building a simple page, explore various techniques to make it feel more professional (i.e. identify why your page doesn't look as good as some other references, and start copying their ideas).