UX Encyclopedia

The UX Resource Directory: Where to Keep Learning

A curated directory for ongoing learning. Individual library files cite their own primary sources in their Sources sections; this file points outward, to the living organizations, publications, and communities worth following. Every entry was verified live in July 2026; paywalls and archival status are annotated honestly. Curation beats completeness — dead sites were dropped.

1. Research-driven organizations (highest evidence quality)

  • Nielsen Norman Group — https://www.nngroup.com — The default usability citation since 1998; thousands of free articles and videos grounded in its own studies. Free articles; paid courses/reports. Active.
  • Baymard Institute — https://baymard.com — Large-scale e-commerce UX testing (150,000+ hours); the authority on checkout, product pages, forms. 300+ articles free; the full 650+ guideline database is paid Premium. Active.
  • MeasuringU (Jeff Sauro) — https://measuringu.com — The best source for quantitative UX: SUS, sample sizes, confidence intervals, rating scales. Rigorous free blog (posting June 2026); paid books/software/reports. Active.
  • Deque Systems — https://www.deque.com — Accessibility research and tooling (axe DevTools); hosts axe-con, a free annual accessibility conference. Free blog and axe-core; paid enterprise products. Active.
  • WebAIM — https://webaim.org — Nonprofit accessibility research; the annual WebAIM Million (2026 edition published) empirically surveys the top 1M home pages, plus screen-reader user surveys. Free. Active.
  • W3C Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) — https://www.w3.org/WAI/ — Publisher of WCAG itself, plus tutorials and ARIA guidance. Free. Active.

2. Official platform guidelines

Cited throughout this library (04-design-systems/, 06-accessibility/). All free, all actively maintained.

3. Publications & magazines

  • Smashing Magazine — https://www.smashingmagazine.com — Long-form, editorially reviewed design/front-end articles (strong UX and accessibility sections). Free; optional paid membership. Active (weekly as of July 2026).
  • A List Apart — https://alistapart.com — The standards-era institution; slower cadence now but still publishing (most recent article June 2026). Deep archive on content strategy, IA, and responsible design. Free. Active.
  • UX Collective — https://uxdesign.cc — Largest curated design publication (Medium-based, plus a Substack newsletter); editor-curated, not peer-reviewed — quality varies by author. Free with Medium's metered paywall on some stories. Active.
  • UX Planet — https://uxplanet.org — High-volume Medium publication; lightly reviewed contributor content — treat as opinion unless sourced. Free with Medium's metered paywall. Active (articles through June 2026).
  • UXmatters — https://www.uxmatters.com — Practitioner web magazine with an editorial process; strong on UX strategy and research practice. Free. Active (articles dated June 2026).
  • UX Booth — https://uxbooth.com — Effectively an archive: the site remains online and its evergreen "Complete Beginner's Guide" series (to UX research, IA, interaction design) is still worth reading, but no regularly dated new publishing could be verified as of July 2026. Free.
  • Adobe XD Ideas — https://xd.adobe.com/ideas/ — Frozen archive. Adobe XD entered maintenance mode (sales ended 2023) and the Ideas blog stopped updating with it (site copyright ends 2023). Some articles remain useful; expect no new content, possible link rot, and no direct successor. Free.
  • HTMHell (Manuel Matuzović) — https://htmhell.dev — Real-world bad-markup autopsies with accessibility-grounded fixes, plus an annual December advent calendar of guest articles. Sporadic cadence, consistently high quality. Free. Active (latest entry Sept 2025).

4. Learning & courses

  • Interaction Design Foundation (brands itself "IxDF") — https://www.interaction-design.org — Same organization and domain; self-paced courses by recognized academics. Flat annual membership (roughly $200–265/yr as of 2026 — pricing shifts; check current). Good breadth-for-money; certificates carry modest industry weight. Active.
  • NN/g UX Training & Certification — https://www.nngroup.com/ux-certification/ — Live courses (~$1,000+ each); certification requires 5 courses + exams — several thousand USD total, but the most respected non-degree credential. Active.
  • Google UX Design Certificate — https://www.coursera.org/professional-certificates/google-ux-design — Beginner-level, self-paced; $49/month Coursera subscription (typically $150–300 total; financial aid available). Solid on-ramp, not an advanced resource; parts still reference the discontinued Adobe XD. Active.
  • Baymard learning resources — https://baymard.com/learn — Free research articles plus paid Premium and enterprise-priced audits/training. The free tier alone is a substantial education in e-commerce UX. Active.

5. Quick-reference & principle sites

  • Laws of UX (Jon Yablonski) — https://lawsofux.com — One-screen summaries of 30+ psychology principles with sources; companion book (see §7). Free (CC BY-NC-ND). Active and still expanding.
  • GoodUI — https://goodui.org — Patterns backed by real A/B test results, including "leaked" experiments from major companies (658+ tests); evidence is real but conversion-focused. Freemium: browsing free, effect sizes behind membership. Active (tests dated June 2026).
  • Growth.design — https://growth.design — Comic-style product teardowns (47 case studies) applying named psychology principles, unusually rigorous about citing research. Freemium; most case studies free. Active.
  • Checklist Design — https://www.checklist.design — 56+ checklists for pages, components, and flows; opinionated convention, not research, but a useful pre-ship sweep. Free (plus free Figma plugin). Active (updated 2026).
  • The Component Gallery (Iain Bean) — https://component.gallery — Cross- references 60 component types across 95+ real design systems: ideal for naming and API decisions. Free. Active (maintained since 2019).
  • Mobbin — https://mobbin.com — 600,000+ categorized screenshots and flows from real iOS/Android/web apps. Freemium: limited free browsing; full library from ~$20/seat/month. Active.
  • Page Flows — https://pageflows.com — Recorded user flows (onboarding, checkout, upgrade) from popular products. Paid: ~$99/year after a $2.95 trial; no meaningful free tier. Active.

6. Communities & Q&A

  • UX Stack Exchange — https://ux.stackexchange.com — Q&A with voting and a long archive; answer quality varies, best answers cite sources. Free. Active.
  • r/UXDesign and r/userexperience — https://reddit.com/r/UXDesign, https://reddit.com/r/userexperience — Career talk, portfolio critique, industry mood; anecdotal by nature. Free. Active.
  • IxDA — https://ixda.org — Honest status: the global nonprofit legally dissolved in 2024, but the site, local chapters, Interaction Awards, and programming continue volunteer-run. Local groups are the practical value. Free.
  • ADPList — https://adplist.org — Free 1:1 mentorship marketplace; 40,000+ verified mentors, heavy design representation. Genuinely free for mentees. Active and growing.

7. Canonical books (the short shelf)

These align with the Sources sections across this library.

  • Norman, The Design of Everyday Things — read for affordances, signifiers, and why interfaces fail.
  • Krug, Don't Make Me Think — read for self-evidence as the first law of web usability.
  • Cooper et al., About Face — read for goal-directed design and interaction patterns at depth.
  • Lidwell/Holden/Butler, Universal Principles of Design — read as a cross-disciplinary principle reference.
  • Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow — read for the dual-system model behind most bias literature.
  • Cialdini, Influence — read for the persuasion principles (and their ethical limits).
  • Weinschenk, 100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know About People — read for digestible, cited psychology.
  • Jarrett & Gaffney, Forms that Work / Wroblewski, Web Form Design — read before designing any form.
  • Rosenfeld/Morville/Arango, Information Architecture (the polar bear book) — read for organizing anything large.
  • Tullis & Albert, Measuring the User Experience / Sauro & Lewis, Quantifying the User Experience — read for UX metrics and the statistics to back them.
  • Yablonski, Laws of UX — read for psychology principles applied directly to interface examples.
  • Greever, Articulating Design Decisions — read for defending design work to stakeholders.
  • Holmes, Mismatch — read for inclusive design as a method, not a checklist.
  • Tufte, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information — read for data-ink, chartjunk, and graphical integrity.

8. Research access

  • Google Scholar — https://scholar.google.com — Free search across papers; use "All versions" to surface free PDFs of paywalled work.
  • ACM Digital Library — https://dl.acm.org — CHI proceedings and the core HCI corpus. Fully open access since January 2026 (ACM Open): the entire back catalog is now free to read — no longer paywalled.
  • arXiv (Human-Computer Interaction, cs.HC) — https://arxiv.org/list/cs.HC/recent — Free preprints; note these are not yet peer-reviewed.
  • Reading paywalled research — For remaining paywalled venues (Elsevier, Springer): search the title plus "PDF" on Google Scholar, check authors' university pages or ResearchGate, or email the author — most happily share preprints.

Keeping this directory fresh

Statuses verified July 2026. Sites die, rebrand, and paywall quietly — re-verify annually alongside the platform spec check in README.md: confirm each URL resolves, spot-check one recent article date per publication, re-check pricing notes. Mark anything that stops publishing as an archive rather than deleting it — archives still teach; pretending they're alive can't.

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