35 People to follow on Twitter and more…

I sat on a panel last night called “A Day in the Life of a UX Designer” and we had such a great conversation. I wanted to repeat some of the themes we discussed and have a place for some of the references and tips that were suggested to the attendees.

I made reference to the UX Honeycomb that Peter Morville wrote about and so I wanted to reference it here:

User Experience Design

A suggestion I made to aspiring UX Designers, was to follow design leaders on Twitter, look at who they are following, and follow those people too. Twitter has been a wonderful professional resource to me for a few reasons. I’ve found that it’s become a human built RSS feed of sorts where the people I’ve learn from, are posting useful things that they find useful. The other helpful thing has been personally reaching out to people to ask questions. Twitter has been a group mentor of sorts for me in that regard.

With that said, here is a list of twitter links to go follow these people:

Don Norman (@jnd1er) | Twitter

Christina Wodtke (@cwodtke) | Twitter

Scott Jehl (@scottjehl) | Twitter

Ian Fenn (@ifenn) | Twitter

Kim Goodwin (@kimgoodwin) | Twitter

Eric Reiss (@elreiss) | Twitter

Jacklyn Cohen (@playfulpixel) | Twitter

katie mccurdy (@katiemccurdy) | Twitter

COURTNEY BOLTON, UX. (@courtneybolton) | Twitter

James Victore (@JamesVictore) | Twitter

Bill Beard (@writebeard) | Twitter

Brad Frost (@brad_frost) | Twitter

Laura Klein (@lauraklein) | Twitter

Tomer Sharon (@tsharon) | Twitter

Aaron Irizarry (@aaroni) | Twitter

Dana Chisnell (@danachis) | Twitter

Whitney Quesenbery (@whitneyq) | Twitter

Guy Kawasaki (@GuyKawasaki) | Twitter

Nick Finck (@nickf) | Twitter

Luke Wroblewski (@lukew) | Twitter

Mark Boulton (@markboulton) | Twitter

Kainne Hansbury (@kainne) | Twitter

Jeff Gothelf (@jboogie) | Twitter

Margot Bloomstein (@mbloomstein) | Twitter

Paul Irish (@paul_irish) | Twitter

Ethan Marcotte (@beep) | Twitter

Bill Scott (@billwscott) | Twitter

Peter Merholz (@peterme) | Twitter

Louis Rosenfeld (@louisrosenfeld) | Twitter

John Maeda (@johnmaeda) | Twitter

Josh Clark (@bigmediumjosh) | Twitter

Chris Risdon (@ChrisRisdon) | Twitter

dan klyn (@danklyn) | Twitter

Dan Saffer (@odannyboy) | Twitter

Brian Durkin (@uXbd) | Twitter

I wanted to also leave a list of books for people to read if they want something to reference. I discussed at one point the book:

Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (Harper Perennial Modern Classics)

Here are 10 other books that are suggestions of mine (sorry for the amzn links but go check these out):

Designing Connected Products: UX for the Consumer Internet of Things

Radical Focus: Achieving Your Most Important Goals with Objectives and Key Results

Thinking, Fast and Slow

Social Physics: How Social Networks Can Make Us Smarter

Interviewing Users: How to Uncover Compelling Insights

The Design of Everyday Things: Revised and Expanded Edition

Validating Product Ideas: Through Lean User Research

Design Sprint: A Practical Guidebook for Building Great Digital Products

Information Architecture: For the Web and Beyond

I really enjoyed discussing the things I love about UX and how I got into this wonderful and empathetic practice.

The last bit of advice I could give is to keep with it. The world is catching up to what UX Design is and the understanding of things like; UI is not UX, and process can help facilitate the validation of design ideas.

For follow up questions, follow me on twitter.

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