When I was starting out in the field of UX design, I used to feel very lost and off- track. How should I start? Where and what should I look for? What should I read? I had to figure out everything on my own.

So to not get overwhelmed with all the resources I had to learn and to provide it with a structure, I started creating my own list of resources on which I could rely or fall back to.

So here are the links that I have been collecting from over the past 2 years which I found to be quite useful. I will try to regularly update whenever I find something interesting and new. Hope you enjoy this random scattering of links and hope everyone could find at least one new helpful resource out of this article.

User Experience (UX) Design

What is UX Design?

• What does a UX Designer do: takes you through the basics of UX Design, what skills does a UX designer actually need, tells you about personas, information architecture, wireframes, user testing, visual design, usability testing and beyond.
• User Experiences (UX) Designer is an article by the Interaction Design Foundation (IDF) explains the constantly-updated definition of User Experience (UX) Design and includes a collection of topical content and literature.
• The Different Areas Of UX Design: is a part of a course by Career Foundry focusing on specialist routes within the UX design field.
• Who is a UX Designer simply makes you understand what UX Design is and the differences in Different fields of UX like UX research, design, UX copy, user testing.
• How to change your career from graphic designer to UX designer: Another post by IDF explaining how do you go about switching from graphic design to UX design? What Do Graphic Design and UX Design Have in Common? And the Differences between Graphic Design and UX Design.

UX Design Process:

• User Experience Design Process: is an overview of Stakeholders and Activities involved in each stage.
• UX Process: What It Is, What It Looks Like and Why It’s Important by Nick Babich.
• How to do these different UX design methods by IDEO: Design Kit
• How to teach yourself is a living list of UX resources for self-starters on every step of learning UX design
• UX Methods by usability.gov
• Stanford d.school’s Design Thinking Process Mode Guide(pdf) takes you through the basics of what are the UX design process.

UX Design Resources/Blogs you should follow:

Links you should definitely bookmark if you haven’t already

• Material Design Guideline for Android
• IOS Human Interface Design Guidelines
• Design kit by IDEO: A place to place to learn about the power of human-centred design:
• A curated list of Mobile design Resources
• Nielsen Norman Group: Founded by the Pioneers of User Experience: Don Norman and Jacob Nielsen
• Product design inspirations, learnings, tips, articles on different topics and news updates every day on Product design

Blogs/Magazines

• Smashing Magazine
• Konigi Articles
• 52 Weeks of UX
• A list apart
• The design team
• UX Magazine

Things you need to know before starting out:

• How to become a UX Designer at 40 with no digital or design experience, Notes I wish I’d had before becoming a Designer in Sydney: I included this article because it provides an overview of the tools used in this field for designing and prototyping, Guy Ligertwood shared his design process and contains a list of books that every designer should read.
• Check out what and why of usability for understanding all the different fields of UX design by usability.gov.

Before starting a project:

• These articles have helped me a lot without getting overwhelmed with all the information and tasks I need to do. Opened up my mind by helping me empathise with the user and ultimately made the forming of the UX process or structure easier. You can also form your own questionnaire with the help of these posts and use it as a template for all your projects.
• Questions UX designers should be asking: Designing is easier when you start with the answers.
• Essential questions to ask when starting a UX design project
• Questions UX Designers should ask.

Laws of UX:

• Laws of UX: A website dedicated to laws of UX and contains all the laws you need to know related to UX.
• The most important rule everyone is breaking: About the simple laws that most people overlook in Product design.
• Explained in an easy language, 6 laws that help you create better designs
• UX Laws with practical examples

Usability Heuristics

• 10 Usability Heuristics with examples
• A step by step guide to what is heuristic evaluation
• 10 Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design
• What is Heuristic evaluation by IDF

Design Principles

• Design Principles are a set of considerations that form the basis of any good product. Principles.design is an open-source collection of Design Principles and methods.
• How to teach yourself explains Psychology + design: Gestalt principles you can use as design solutions explain what Gestalt Principle is and how we can use it to improve our designs.
• Design principles that help you shape the best user experience: some principles to follow when designing a product (an app, a website or a physical product) and how it would help shape the better user experience.

UX Research

• The types of design research every designer should know NOW takes you through the basics of types of user research.
• Complete Beginner’s Guide to UX Research explains user research a bit in detail, what are common methodologies and people to follow.
• The complete guide to UX research methods
• What and why: basics for UX Research- for different methods of UX research by usability.gov
• Google Ventures guide to UX Research for startups
• Instagram post about UX Research Methods by Anfisign.

User Research Interviews

• Starter questions for User research interviews: a list of questions that you can use throughout the customer and product development process.
• User Interview Example questions: for usability and web accessibility from Yale University.
• Art of the User Interview: Everything you need to know about conducting useful user interviews by Nick Babich on Medium.

User Stories and User Personas:

• A Complete Guide to User Story Mapping: Process, Tips, Advantages, and Use Cases in Product Management takes you through the basics of personas
• The Easy Way to Writing Good User Stories.
• A step by step guide on how to make a UX persona.
• Another helpful article on how to make a user persona.
• Crafting User Personas: exploring the process of creating user personas and how to derive valuable insight into your product’s requirements:
• UX Personas- why personas still prove to be useful.

Patterns of mobile navigation

• UX Design Patterns for Mobile Apps: Which and Why- Solutions for recurring problems in UX often start with tried and tested UX design patterns. In this article find out which ones to use and why to use them.
• Basic Patterns for Mobile Navigation: examines three basic navigation patterns for mobile apps — hamburger menu, tab bar and gesture-based navigation — and describe strengths and weaknesses of each of them.
• Hamburger menu alternatives for mobile navigation.
• Hamburger Menus and Hidden Navigation Hurt UX Metrics tells how discoverability is cut almost in half by hiding a website’s main navigation. Also, task time is longer and perceived task difficulty increases.
• Web Layout Best Practices: 12 Timeless UI Patterns Analysed.

UX Libraries

Collection of screenshots or user patterns of the different apps to help you see what works, what doesn’t and to observe patterns that you should or shouldn’t integrate into your app and get inspired to create the best user experiences possible for your app.

• A library of screenshots for UX inspiration capturing over 1000 user flows: https://www.reallygoodux.io/
• http://collectui.com/
• Little big details: https://littlebigdetails.com/
• https://pttrns.com/
• http://uxarchive.com/
• https://androidniceties.tumblr.com/
• https://inspired-ui.com/

Articles on different UX Topics

AI, Chatbots and Conversational Design

• People + AI guidebook: A guidebook to help you build human-centred AI products. It’ll enable you to avoid common mistakes, design excellent experiences, and focus on people as you build AI-driven applications.
• Conversational UI’s: Collection of articles, lessons, videos and other resources about product design for voice and chat interfaces in product design.
• Conversational UI Principles: A case study describing an entire process of designing a conversational UI for a B2B website
• The complete beginner’s guide to a chatbot.
• Usability Heuristics for Bots: Nielsen’s heuristics of user experience applied and explained for chatbots.
• How to nail a great chatbot experience
• https://ai.google/education

Atomic design and design systems

• Atomic Design: A book by Brad Frost which explains what Atomic Design is and everything you should know about the topic.
• Setting up atomic design: How to build a system that provides a unified set of UX, design rules and patterns.
• How to design a system of components: Atomic Design in simple language.
• Everything you need to know about Design Systems explains what design systems are, the difference between a style guide and pattern library and all the things you should know about design systems.
• Colour in Design Systems, tips and tricks and 16 lessons Nahan learned while stabilising a primary palette, tint and shade choices, secondary palettes, and solving for accessible contrast.
• Typography in Design systems.
• Buttons in the design system.
• Space in the design systems.
• For everything else: Nathanacurtis
• Building a Visual Language, Behind the scenes of Airbnb’s design system.

Search interface

• Search interface 20 things to consider answers: What questions to ask users? What to consider while prototyping? And what are the best practices in search interface design?
• Search redesign: Defining search patterns and models describes the common search patterns and models and what are they used for.
• Best practises for search tells us do’s and dont’s.

Bad UX

• 7 inexcusable yet common UX gaffes that make you look like a total amateur.
• Bad UX Roundup #12: It’s called HUMAN-computer interaction for a reason.

Inclusive design

• bighack.org : List of Guides and resources to help you create inclusive Products and Services.

Ethical Design

• Ethics for Designers: This website contains tools that will help you uncover, explore and discuss the ethical aspects of your designs. The tools are grouped based on the skill they help you develop and can be used in different phases of the design process.

Other Articles:

• The State of UX in 2020
• The Most Important Rule in UX Design that Everyone Breaks.
• The lies we tell ourselves as designers — and more UX links this week: A weekly collection of UX links, brought to you by your friends at the UX Collective.
• iPhone screen resolutions.
• Voice user interface- Everything you need to know about Voice User Interface in 2018.

Other UX Design Resources:

• 99 Design Resources for UX Newbies
• Free Resources from thefutur.com: It has free resources for Design Fundamentals, Personal Growth, Sales and Marketing like Color Resource Guide, Typography Manual, Lettering workshop, Personal Branding worksheet, etc
• Plugins

Courses available for UX online:

• Top 10 Online Platforms to Learn UI/UX
• Instagram post by Ioana aka UX goodies

UI Design

• A/B tested patterns for landing pages, sales funnels, e-commerce sites and apps: https://goodui.org/
• 100+ UI Resources, Tools & Books: All You Need For Your UI Work: List of UI resources for your next project, you will find tools and resources for colours, typography, inspirations, stock photos & videos, blogs, freebies & more tools that will really help you a lot in your coming projects
• How to use Gestalt principles in UI design.
• Optical Effects in User Interfaces: An Illustrated Guide: How to make optically balanced icons, correct shapes alignment, and perfect corner rounding.
• Rules for UI Design: A guide for designers and developers to create beautiful apps and sites and it's part 2.
• Illustrations in UI Design
• Volume Control UI
• Improving Visual Design Skills.
• 10 ways to spice up your UI design: ways to improve look and feel of your UI Design.
• For inspiration: 100 days of motion design.
• Motion design doesn’t have to be hard: In areas most important to a UI, motion design can and should be simple

8 point grid system:

• Benefits of 8 point grid system and how to use it.
• A guide to 8- point-grid system, meant to help designers lay out UI quickly and consistently:

Typography

• Getting typography right in digital design: Typography can make or break a product. Here’s how to excel at it.
• Another similar article: 26 Digital Typography Rules for Beginners
• Monotype- Type resources and case studies for designers and brand owners
• The Anatomy of a Thousand Typefaces takes you through the basics of typography in an attempt to build a font database.
• Web Design is 95% Typography
• Free fonts
• Font Pair: a typography site dedicated to helping creators find the right font pairing for their creative projects
• Harmonious Typography and Grid: A guide on how to select typography for your project.
• Mastering the Power of Nothing: How to use whitespace in user interface design

Case Studies

Examples:

• Uber rebranding
• Airbnbtriplog: A personal project by Yutong & Yunan, two experience designers- Trip log for Airbnb China: Localising the product for the Chinese market.
• Case study of Uber: eScooters Platform
• NotifiVR: Receive notifications in VR through virtual phones, smartwatches, and popups
• Lyft redesign
• Case study about inclusiveness in illustrations

Case study library

• Reallygoodux
• Bestfolios
• Servicedeisgnnetwork: Showcasing the tangible results of the work being conducted by service designers across the globe.

Books

• Free E-books: https://www.uxpin.com/studio/ebooks/
• UX Library for books:
• https://uxtools.co/library/
• https://uxcellence.com/library

Mockups:

• themockupclub
• sketchappsources
• graphicburger
• A Collection of Inspiring Sitemaps and User Flow Maps: speckyboy.com
• inscribemag.com
• http://freedesignresources.net/

Building a portfolio and interview preparations:

• Crafting Your UX Portfolio — A Weekend Guide to Getting It Done: It’s a list of resources and articles that takes you through the entire process of building a portfolio and how to get it done.
• How to build a portfolio and get a job in UX? — tools, processes, tips & tricks explain how should you build your portfolio for your first internship/job and what exactly should be in a case study.
• How to get into UX Design if u have never worked in this field before.
• Get any UX job with a stellar portfolio presentation: Advice Tiffany received from people at Amazon, Microsoft, Google and more
• Landing your first UX Design job with 0 industry experience answers how can you advance further towards the UX/UI industry as a rookie.
• What does it take to succeed at UX Design Interviews? What do companies look for in a candidate and talks about his interview experience at google and apple?
• How to Get A Job in Product Design or UX Without a Portfolio gives tips on approaching recruiters when you don’t have a lot of connections:

UX Design interview questions:

• www.uxbeginner.com/the-4-types-of-ux-interview-questions-to-master/
• www.springboard.com/blog/ux-design-interview-questions/
• www.toptal.com/designers/ux/interview-questions
• 3 vital UX laws to remember and impress your interviewers.

Ux challenges:

If you’re looking for ideas or projects to build up your portfolio you can also start with doing some UX challenges:

• UX Best Design Challenges by Fernandocomet
• 100 example UX problems by Jon Crabb
• dailyui.co/
• project365.design/
• fakeclients.com
• www.uxchallenge.co/
• dailyuxwriting.com/
• uxdesigncontest.com/
• 99designs.com/

Where you can ask for a review:

• Slackbot
• Spectrum chat

Others

• Web History: Internet Archive
• Essay writing paper guide
• Books and podcasts

People

• Julie Zhuo
• Nick Babich
• Anjana Menon
• John Saito
• Zat Rana
• Joanna Ngai
• Blake Powell