UX Booth

I've built my experience mainly through exposure to native mobile. I find that the walled gardens and constraints you work within tend to help focus what you're creating. It's easier to tell when something looks or feels "wrong" when you're looking at apps that are built to match the OS's ecosystem, instead of the latest web trends.

When you work with a standardized set of UI elements on a canvas of limited size, you tend to start thinking about the interface in terms of modular actions and tasks, which you can repurpose later when scaling up to tablet or desktop web. You also have a good basis to simplify these tasks further when branching out to wearables and in-car devices.

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At this point, Google, Apple, and Microsoft each have pretty defined ideologies and UI — check out their guidelines:

https://developer.android.com/design/material/index.html

https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/UserExperience/Conceptual/MobileHIG/

http://dev.windows.com/en-us/design

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Check out some of the sessions from WWDC and Google I/O too:

https://developer.apple.com/videos/wwdc/2014/

https://www.google.com/events/io/io14videos

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There are also a lot of great blogs out there that have pinpointed info on different parts of interface design. Sometimes these info-morsels can be easier to digest than starting a full course in UX. This is definitely not a comprehensive list, so look around, and get your RSS client fired…

That wouldn't be messier than a textual function making 3000 function calls, or accepting 3000 parameters. The way you handle this complexity should be the same in both cases: creating abstractions that bundle together related items, hiding the details on a lower layer and exposing only the general ideas at the outer level.

Unfortunately, visual languages tend to be quite poor at abstraction. We've been developing and improving ways to make better abstractions in textual languages for the last 50 years, but somehow visual languages seem to be using the same abstraction tools we had with ALGOL, when not the same ones we had with Assembler.

For a mental framework on how to analyze and design visual languages for usability, see Cognitive Dimensions of Notations.[1][2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dimensions_of_notations
[2] https://www.uxbooth.com/articles/a-usable-guide-to-cognitive-dimensions/

There are many books and all but if you want to just dive into it, here is the basic process you can build upon (this is how I design):

1) For every page of your site, list BIG 1,2,3. (Like what you want users to do, and two alternates).

2) Now design around that. Make it easier and obvious to follow your 1,2,3 (If there are more than 3 steps - you might wanna break them into more pages).

3) Remove noise and barriers that come in way of BIG 123

4) Test, test, test & Optimize

It's a very short description of how to go about it. But you gotta do it to know what I am talking about.

The aim is to design an experience around user.

Once you've practiced this at least with one project,you can dive into awesome articles at:

http://www.uxbooth.com/
http://www.uxmagazine.com/
http://www.uxmatters.com/

Just read what interests you, but before - practice the above, so you can relate to what they are talking about.

I could, but honestly I'd just be googling "taxonomy". But ok that's not entirely true, I know how to refine my search and recognize when something is what I'm thinking of, from some familiarity with the field.

(But if you want to look around, in addition to "taxonomy" and "ontology", other good terms are "information architecture" and "controlled vocabulary").

These are not things I have vetted, this is literally just me googling and taking a quick skim...

https://blog.optimalworkshop.com/how-to-develop-a-taxonomy-for-your-information-architecture/

https://www.uxbooth.com/articles/introduction-to-taxonomies/

https://www.nngroup.com/articles/taxonomy-101/

http://accidental-taxonomist.blogspot.com/2020/11/what-it-thesaurus-and-what-is-it-good.html

Or how about some textbooks:

https://narrowgaugebooks.indielite.org/book/9781627055802

https://www.hedden-information.com/accidental-taxonomist/

Looks crowded and confusing.

Read and apply this: http://www.uxbooth.com/blog/good-call-to-action-buttons/

The nav bar, the log in button, and the two red links are all too prominent, so nothing jumps out. Topright signin, large login, red sign up for free, bottom left sign up - redundant. How it works in navbar, Help, red See how it works, What is Txtms - redundant. Every extra option is one less reason to choose ANY option.

I have no idea what your site does. However, when I read the "tip", everything became clear: "To start sharing your profile, have any mobile user text your User ID to x@txtms.com." Reword that and put it on the front page. You also might want to explain why this isn't just a business myspace for mobile phones.

This Quora thread might be an interesting starting point if you're looking for freelancers:

- http://www.quora.com/Who-are-the-best-web-designers-under-25?q=Best+designers

Strolling through Dribble might also give you some inspiration:

- http://dribbble.com/

The UX world gathers on blogs like:

- http://uxbooth.com

- http://konigi.com

- http://usabilitypost.com

- http://uxdesign.smashingmagazine.com

- http://johnnyholland.org

Some of them might offer job postings as well.