When stepping out into the world of user experience, newbies may want to make the first step of their journey research-driven in order to discover the best UX resources. This encompasses a lot of different elements, including learning material, demonstrations, community resources and tools. UX is a rich and cross-industry field covering programming, logistics, math and art in a very balanced parallel. To work in UX, one must have a flair for all of these trades to a sufficient level, meaning that UX has one of the more diversified requirement sets of any modern immerging profession. So yes, you’re going to need the best UX resources in order to tackle a field like this. First, you need a target platform and functionality concept. This is usually decided by those preceding the UX team’s involvement. This requires little thought in this situation. Knowing the platform and functionality, you need to choose your tools. This may also be partly decided ahead of time, but you are more likely to have some liberty here. It’s best to choose an IDE environment and/or a competent, standard graphical suite with which to work. Adobe’s series work well for visual element design, and IDEs such as Visual Studio, MonoDevelop and NetBeans work for various interface implementations. Next, you will need learning material and community resources. These will extend your knowledge of functionality for various UX platforms, and will also provide inspiration on new and novel design concepts that may bring about more positive UX than previous implementations. The internet is rich with such resources, like Planet Source Code, which demonstrates various programming and interface concepts at work, from which to learn. For questions and answers, forums like Stack Overflow provide answers mostly instantly to your question, because someone else has already likely asked it. Lastly, for visual inspiration and stylistic resources, the best place to look is actually going to be artistic sites with a wide range of art types. Sites like DeviantArt and WonderFl provide artists who show off new designs and aesthetics for all sorts of things, program interfaces, web designs and layouts alike. For those who wish to follow UX trends and topics, blogs hosted on places like Tumblr can easily be found and followed that allow a UX newbie to get a feel for the current attitude with UX, and to stay contemporary on all of the problems and solutions discovered, and to get inspiration for their own current or future application of UX science in a project. It’s mostly about having sources of input from others versed and diverse within the field of UX. While tools matter, they’re circumstantial to a given project, and many factors here cannot be entirely decided by the UX team. As a result, it’s more about the conceptual inspiration a group of artistic and computer literate minds can conjure, and applying iterations of these expressions in ways that work to reach demographics and represent properly functionality of a given system or service. The artistic side of UX is very heavy, the programming side mainly being in simply knowing the basic rules of how interfaces work. So, the best UX resources are mostly data, not tools.
