The State of the UX Community

The Rise of the Virtual Organization

Divergence or convergence aside, however, in the process of considering this question, it’s also worth noting: The nature of professional organizations is changing in significant ways.

While the industrial revolution brought people together to work in factories and live in cities, the information revolution has allowed people to do the opposite—to work together, though geographically separated, on distributed teams. For knowledge workers, UX practitioners, and researchers, our professional organizations increasingly reflect this new reality.

Some of our organizations operate almost entirely in cyberspace. For example, a mailing-list community constitutes the most active core of IxDA and has thousands of members. This discussion group, which is also accessible via the organization’s Web site, shown in Figure 2, covers a variety of topics from software tools to design patterns and techniques to education to jobs to industry news. While IxDA held its first international Interaction conference in Savannah, Georgia, in February 2008, and has numerous local gatherings in cities from New York to Mumbai to Manila, it’s arguable that we find much of the day-to-day value of IxDA in its virtual community. In fact, IxDA organizers made a special effort to post videos of the conference online to share with members who couldn’t make the trip to Savannah.

Given that a majority of UX work happens in the virtual space, it’s fitting that UX organizations use the Web, email, and other electronic means of communication, not just to support their offline activities, but to build their memberships and create virtual environments that give their members a sense of place and belonging. A virtual organization may be the perfect format for professional associations, saving overhead costs, while facilitating interaction among their memberships.

Creative Workers, Community, and Service

In The Rise of the Creative Class, author and sociologist Richard Florida examines the growth of knowledge workers, their economic importance, their lifestyles, and their work-styles within the context of the cities in which they live. Florida’s hypothesis is that Creative Class professionals cluster in cities where amenities such as universities, arts, tolerance for different lifestyles, and access to outdoor activities are present. UX practitioners live squarely within the Creative Class camp.

Florida explains that, as creative professionals, we are developing more loose connections with other people—interacting with them on only a semi-regular basis—and fewer strong ones. We know people’s names and faces, their work and reputation. We may even have worked with them at some point in a professional or volunteer capacity or had an interesting discussion with them at a conference or networking event. The way we work is changing, which directly affects our communities and society. On this topic, Florida commented:

“One thing, however, is certain: We cannot hope to sustain a strong Creative Economy in a fractured and incoherent society. Thus our economic and social challenges are inextricably intertwined. ... The key is to create new mechanisms for building social cohesion in an era defined by diversity, high rates of mobility, weak ties, and contingent commitments.”

Such “weak ties and contingent commitments” are a feature of many UX groups. People in our field are often geographically dispersed. Many work in physical isolation from their virtual teammates. So, while this isolation has caused UX professionals to seek more social interaction with their peers—a need that, in the old days, meetings of labor unions or a single monolithic trade organization might have fulfilled—the nature of our creative world has also made strong commitments to a professional group difficult to maintain. In a field in which many people never know how late their workday will go or what city they will be in on a given day, how can anyone commit to attending meetings at a particular location, at the same time of day, on the same day every week or even every month?

Since UX professionals have limited free time and uncertain schedules, UX organizations have had to reduce their demands on potential members and accept a more come-and-go-as-you-please attitude. People go to networking functions when they’re looking for work—or looking to hire—and skip them when they’re fully engaged. They attend an organization’s meetings only when a particular topic or speaker of interest comes up. They contribute comments or just lurk on discussion boards as their time permits. And they volunteer to work on perhaps a single initiative of their professional group each year, scattering their hours of labor over many months or getting everything done in a two-day burst of effort between their work’s project deadlines.

When so many UX professionals continually switch between overlapping communications and social networking technologies like LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, IM, SMS, email, Skype, Flickr, YouTube, del.icio.us, Digg, and on and on, should it be any wonder that we treat our professional organizations in the same manner? Rather than mourn the fractured nature of our professional communities, perhaps we should embrace their innovation, their faceted nature, and the varying benefits they offer, in the same way we embrace the chaos of our industry’s ever-changing digital tools. If people in the Creative Class wanted a single, monolithic answer to all of our diverse needs, we wouldn’t have invented the modern digital world. We would have been happy with Ma Bell.

A Larger Mission for User Experience Organizations

The proliferation of UX groups—and, as anyone who has attended an event in the past year can attest, their booming participation rates—demonstrates the vitality of our professional organizations at a time when traditional civic groups are struggling to maintain membership. The Lions Club, Kiwanis, and other service groups are shrinking in size. At the same time, members of the Creative Class are looking for new ways to connect with each other and give back to their communities. While our professional groups are not yet truly public service organizations, this seems like a goal worth pursuing. And, as UX professionals, there are tremendously interesting problems for us to solve. Might the diversity of professional organizations in the UX community be a harbinger of an altogether different concept of what an association is?

What problems could we solve? We could support designing for the 90% of the world in need of better technology and opportunities, as with the One Laptop Per Child program. We could turn our attention to the looming energy crisis or search out opportunities to bring a better user experience to our healthcare system.

The increasingly diverse nature of our professional groups is a natural evolution, as creative workers seek to interact with each other in new ways. While it would be easy to condemn the current proliferation of associations as a splintering of the UX community into competing pieces that block our progress, these associations are developing and growing within the greater context of broad changes in the way we work. We may need to alter our old definitions of professional organizations as our associations become increasingly virtual and we search for ways to support each other for the good of the UX community and society as a whole.