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Design and programming seem to be two different disciplines. But as a programmer myself, I really want to have some UI skills too. But I feel at a loss because delving into a different industry can seem daunting.
Could somebody nicely suggest some guidelines/roadmap for programmers to learn designs helping them to skin their programming works? So that programmers like me would not need to only have horrible skins but have some nicer skins for their program user inteface.
Read
Then read Sketching User Experiences for sketching, learn what a persona is (google it or read the entire book The Inmates Are Running the Asylumn), and Emotional Design for desirabity.
Good solutions are usable, useful, and desirable.
To start designing, understand who will be using your solution and what your objectives are. Why are you doing this? What should this accomplish? How can I write this in a way that can be measured?
Products suck because people build the first thing that comes to mind. Or they build something they think is cool. Keep building cool stuff if you want to invent something big like the railroad, the telephone, or the TV. Realize 97% (or some ridiculously high percent) of those projects fail. To innovate, you need to find a need. Contextual Design or Observing the User Experience will get you started observing people.
Design of Everyday things will snap you out of that trance you've been in your whole life. Inmates are Running the Asylumn will demonstrate how awful engineers and programmers are at designing solutions, beginning with their attitude toward people.
Nuclear plant meltdowns, plane crashes, space shuttle disasters, the 2000 United States Presidential Election being awarded to George Bush, and almost all the shitty stuff in your life could be prevented with good design. Read Thoughts on Interaction Design to learn how designers will be working with politicians in the future to solve the world's "wicked problems:" poverty and education.
User experience isn't only about designing the user interface, it is about planning the user's interaction with the product.
This affects the requirements, not only the interface.
The design of the actual interface builds on this and adds readability, emphasis, lack of distractions and aesthetics.
There are good books you can read such as " Don't make me think", " The psychology of everyday things" and others you can find recommended in this and other sites.
On another note, you might want to look into software project management topics including gathering and writing requirements and software cycle management and software engineering topics such as UML to get the complete picture of software development.
