Comments on: Help me find IA and UXD educational resources.

Question: Help me find IA and UXD educational resources.

Mister_A — Fri, 30 May 2008 07:57:26 -0800

Please recommend resources for learning more about and staying current on user experience design and information architecture.

I am particularly keen to hear about books, periodicals, and educational web sites on the subject, but live training is a possibility too. Cheap is good, but I don't mind paying. I have some technical knowledge, but not advanced technical skills, so technical jargon is OK, but I prefer to learn more about current concepts and theories in IA and UXD, as I supervise the design and development of sites.

By: Nelsormensch

Nelsormensch — Fri, 30 May 2008 08:08:29 -0800

Steve Krug's Don't Make Me Think is excellent.

By: gsh

gsh — Fri, 30 May 2008 08:17:46 -0800

Boxes and Arrows is the granddaddy of them all.

Also, my del.icio.us links:

IA
UX

By: greenie2600

greenie2600 — Fri, 30 May 2008 08:38:40 -0800

Infosthetics is more on the theoretical side of information science, but is chock full of fascinating stuff.

By: hitopshelf

hitopshelf — Fri, 30 May 2008 08:42:29 -0800

Signal vs. Noise, the 37 Signals blog often has interesting posts that spark good discussions.
http://www.37signals.com/svn/

By: Mister_A

Mister_A — Fri, 30 May 2008 08:45:09 -0800

Thanks everyone. I would like to hear about resources that have personally been useful to you, the answerer. MeMail me or post here, as you see fit. Nice list so far though.

By: xammerboy

xammerboy — Fri, 30 May 2008 09:59:04 -0800

I have over ten years experience working as a human factors professional. Here are my "best of" recommendations:

Organizations:
- ACM SIGGCHI (Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction)
- UPA (Usability Professional's Association)

Books:
- Usability Engineering, J.Nielsen
- The Design of Everyday Things, Norman
- The Usability Engineering Lifecycle, D. Mayhew
- Principles and Guidelines in Software User Interface Design, D.Mayhew
- The Handbook of Usability Testing, J.Rubin

Tools:
- Visio (to create rapid prototypes)

Websites:
- Useit.com
- Boxesandarrows.com
- Yale Web Style Guide

By: ImproviseOrDie

ImproviseOrDie — Fri, 30 May 2008 10:26:33 -0800

I haven't seen these listed yet, which have all been very useful to me:

Books:
- Information Architecture for the World Wide Web (3rd ed.), P. Morville and L. Rosenfeld
- Designing Web Navigation, J. Kalbach
- Information Architecture: Blueprints for the Web, C. Wodtke (good for beginners)
- Web Redesign 2.0: Workflow that Works, K. Goto (ignore the "Re" in the title)
- Designing for Interaction, D. Saffer
- About Face: The Essentials of Interaction Design, A. Cooper

Web sites:
- Findability, Peter Morville's site
- Blog by danah boyd, Berkeley PhD student in social computing/networking research and frequent speaker/consultant on theories of same
- UI Patterns
- Welie
- Livia Labate's blog (also had lots of links to other good IA/UX blogs)
- Jared Spool's Brain Sparks blog
- Andrew Hinton's site
- Adaptive Path blog

By: amtho

amtho — Fri, 30 May 2008 10:43:49 -0800

I subscribe to the newsletter of UIE (User Interface Engineering), and the articles are usually pretty interesting.

By: mark7570

mark7570 — Fri, 30 May 2008 12:21:31 -0800

I'd add Good Experience, in particular the list of Good Experience Resources (for customer experience practitioners): http://goodexperience.com/resources