User Experience

Question

Any key to become a user experience design and Rich Internet Application design? What should I learn to reach it?

Answer 1

I'm not clear how far you intend to go, just design or design and implement? I'll assume the latter.

Study the art of the possible. Visit websites, note what you like. Where the experiences are good.

Try to be a user - visit bad websites consider how you would improve them. For the moment forget the "how" just focus on the "wouldn't it be cool if ..."

Now skill up on the how. Choose a Rich UI Technology, eg. Dojo. Implement just the user experience end of some of your ideas - fake all the services.

You will end up needing to know quite detailed technical skills, each of the Rich UI technologies is quite a deep study, so that's why I recommend picking just one. For example to get going with Dojo you need to know JavaScript quite well, CSS to get the presentation right and then the Dojo framework itself, plus applying that to AJAX concepts. It's not a small amount of work and it needs to be very hands on.

Then there's what's happening on the server side too - where did all that data come from? A whole other area of study. In some situations you don't actually need to know this, you can be part of team where someone else does that stuff. I think it's helpful if you at least understand some of nwhat's going on there.

Answer 2

This book could be a good start:

http://www.amazon.com/Think-Common-Sense-Approach-Usability/dp/0789723107

Answer 3

Some good anti-patterns to avoid when designing UI's/RIA's in this video

http://videos.visitmix.com/MIX09/C06F

Answer 4

How does one become good? Practice. How do one go from good to great? Mojo.

Here are some books that helped me: http://commadot.com/books-for-ux/