UX Crash Course: Fundamentals

I am the author. Thank you for pointing out my mistake: I TOTALLY AGREE about the new tab&#x2F;window issue, and I have now fixed it. That must have been brutal on a mobile device.<p>It was intended to open a new window when linking from the &quot;directory&quot; post, but going from post-to-post in sequence shouldn&#x27;t open 31 new tabs. They were posted one-at-a-time, so I didn&#x27;t realize what would happen when being viewed as a set of 31.<p>A rather cringe-worthy oversight, I would say. It was indeed a Tumblr theme setting, which I changed, and also 31 instances of hand-editing the html of the articles, which was super fun. ;)<p>Apologies to everyone who suffered and thank you for the feedback. I just wish I had noticed sooner!

&gt; In my opinion, most designers’ weak spot is analysis. But we can fix that! Analysis is the main thing that separates UX from other types of design, and it makes you extremely valuable.<p>Agree with this. Most designers lose a lot of credibility trying to argue in favor of their design in the face of facts showing otherwise.<p>Although not everything needs to be objective like the shade of color of a button (See Doug Bowman and Google), but a lot of UX people ignore KPIs, or don&#x27;t care to take the initiative measure them, hoping that their design performs well or depending on product managers to do it.

Sorry to be negative, but the UX of this guide is actually pretty bad. They&#x27;re using target=&quot;_blank&quot; to open links to the next day&#x27;s lesson in a new tab instead of current window. Why?<p>Set aside the general argument that it&#x27;s never really appropriate to do this - because it&#x27;s certainly not appropriate in this context. The user just finished reading your article, and thought it was good enough to read another one. Why would you presume they need to keep the current one open indefinitely?<p>I have a hard time taking advice on a subject from someone who isn&#x27;t practicing it well on their own projects.

Quick heads up: make Javascript listen for keystrokes of ctrl+0 and other zoom events, and submit them to some counter. Perhaps I&#x27;m not the only one trying to unzoom the website; the header and lead take up the whole screen on a full hd screen. The rest of the font size seems okay at first glance.<p>Edit: Then I realized this is a UX guide. Ironic.<p>Edit2: And then I read through it, it is actually pretty nice! Read a few pages and bookmarked where I left off, thanks for sharing :)

It appears the author has updated the site to stop opening the &quot;next article&quot; links in a new window. Thank you! Responding to user wants&#x2F;needs is one of the most important aspects of UX, and to the author&#x27;s credit they responded in a very timely manner to this one.

For the people complaining about the &#x27;target=&quot;_blank&quot; thing,&#x27; I&#x27;m guessing the user has to do a little bit of UX for themselves to use this site.<p>What works for me to make this a reasonable experience is to keep the index page open, open a chapter, read it, close it, open the next one. Not entirely terrible. Just use Cmd&#x2F;Ctrl+W instead of the back button. Not really that bad, especially considering that&#x27;s how I&#x27;ve preferred to use sites I want to see more than one thing from anyway (like wc3.org, google results, shopping search results, etc).

Wow, this is awesome. Just dumped most of the links into my UX instapaper folder to read through on the train. Brilliant work, and what I&#x27;ve read so far is really interesting. Cheers for sharing.

The UX on this site would be better if every link did not open in a new window, especially since each article is so short.

Regardless of usability, I appreciate this guide. I&#x27;ve long since needed an intro to UX, and this guide seems good enough for that. I hope&#x2F;expect it will end with references to further reading.<p>Thanks for posting.

This seems to focus a lot on visual design and web layouts. Visual design is very important - more important than it&#x27;s usually credited in traditional UI design circles - but user experience is still very much about how things WORK.<p>If there is a separate article for a layout concept like Axis of Interaction, I would cover with similar emphasis fundamental user interaction design concepts such as inplace editing, modality, overview by detail, details on demand, undo, etc.

A little pedantic here, but in Day 4 you say, &quot;1 opinion could be completely wrong.&quot;<p>I was taught that you never start a sentence with a numeral, always spell it out. &quot;One opinion could be completely wrong.&quot;

Bad UX as it does not allow moving along pages with arrow keys or links.

Is there a reason why the text takes up 10% of my monitor width? So much wasted white space that could be filled with text.

Thank you very much for sharing!