The big thing about other races is that that they need to be relatable enough that the reader can identify with them, but different enough so that they arent just funny looking humans. The most common way Ive seen for that is to take the normal human trait mix, but skew it so that one aspect is heavily exaggerated. Elves that are all inhumanly graceful and long-lived, or maybe place an exaggerated importance on Nature. Dwarves that are rough and abrasive. Vampires that hate themselves. Werewolves with temper issues. Of course, that route will take you dangerously close to some of the over-used cliches out there, but if you put your own spin on it and run with it, you can sometimes find yourself with an interestingly new thing. Those sorts of ideas, for me, usually start with a What-If statement. A good example (despite later becoming the angst cliche) were the Anne Rice Lestat books, in that it took a human and asked "What if your physiology only had one requirement?" Well lets see, all the signals and responses your body has to inputs would combine, so lust, hunger, thirst, warmth and breathing would all be one unified urge, and partaking of that would combine the satisfaction of getting all of those things at once. Then you make it a predatory need that runs counter to the common community/herd based morality, and you have both your relatable similarity, and your exaggerated distinction.
On the other hand, you can make the differences themselves the exaggerated element, which is probably a bit harder to manage, but can provide a sharper contrast. I havent read Oz's example, but Ive seen Mating Habits of the Earthbound Human, which sounds like its basically the same idea; its a normal Boy Meets Girl type love story, but its narrated as if an alien anthropologist were studying strange clothed apes in their natural habitat. The trick with those stories is to use the dramatic differences to raise questions or point out social/cultural oddities that the reader can relate to, rather than relating to the alien character themselves. In that film, it was mostly assigning ridiculous sounding motivations for various aspects of the modern courtship process, with a heavily satirical tone (The Narrator is voiced by David Hyde Pierce). Great flick...
