Best way to learn UX?

[MERGE-Chicago]

Does anyone have any good resources, books, or methods to begin learning User Experience? I would love to hear anyone's advice or entry into it. Looking to mesh SEO with UX tactics to diversify strategies.

[RobertJakobson]

Hi, the field of User Experience is vast. There are many books and online courses that go directly at the topic or show how to solve tasks with specific tools such as the now popular Sketch app for Mac and so on. I am sure others will post those. Others will also mention HCI and more academic subjects.

But a thinking man's or woman's guide to UX combines a wider sense of the subject — allowing you to communicate with ad agencies, clients and colleagues alike:

• Modern graphic design. Exemplified as a book in Josef Müller-Brockmann's "Grids in Graphic Design"
• Statistics, testing and data analysis. The best book might be a more general introduction such as "How To Measure Anything".
• To be honest, classical advertising also plays a role so reading "Ogilvy on Advertising" might place UX in a wider context.

Still, the most important thing is good knowledge of javascript.

• You need not rely on an external developer to implement many of your designs,
• You can quickly and easily test the various ideas found in popular books and academic papers alike.
• You can develop your good taste for the aesthetics of your products with small details that go beyond ordinary. We call them delighters.

[RangeMarketing]

Hey!

Everyone has different learning styles so it's hard to suggest an absolute 'best way' to get into UX. If you're on twitter, I suggest following industry experts @jmspool and @lukew.

There are a lot of UX sites out there too. Page one for 'UX' or 'User Experience Design' on Google is a great start.

Because UX is so vast, you might want to get a sense of everything that encompasses it and then decide what aspects you really want to dive into. For example, you might find user research and usability testing boring but really be interested in Information Architecture or Interaction Design and focus on that.

It's definitely a smart idea to start to get more familiar with UX even if you don't plan on turning it into a career. UX already is a huge part of SEO in my opinion and is only going to become more important.

Best of luck!

[Cocoonfxmedia]

Focus groups... Find out what users want then design and build round this. Google only herps on about UX simply if your website is designed and thought out correctly users will share and stay and keep coming back to the website.

[Sheena_Schleicher]

Don't forget to pull from your own experience. We've all encountered easy & difficult to navigate sites or frustrating checkouts - take the good, avoid the bad.