Community: UX News

I consider myself to be an advocate for the development of a coherent information architecture (IA) practice. However, my words would fall on deaf ears without the groundwork that many other industry contributors have laid. In fact, many of you who are reading this column are probably contributors to IA practice at some level. I am also an active practitioner and researcher in UX design—and thus, am a contributor to the field of UX design as well, just as many of you are. Others reading this article may be contributors to the field of interaction design. As active contributors to our professional practices, we help to sustain the fields of information architecture, interaction design, and user experience.

Information architecture, interaction design, and UX design are three major practices that have significantly evolved our approach to creating well-designed digital products and services. This hasn’t happened by chance. Industry wide, our collective efforts have promoted the maturity of our respective fields, making this evolution possible. Read More

In our increasingly connected world of 2012, we have more ways of continually learning to better understand, communicate, live, and work with each other, both locally and globally. The old boundaries, borders, and divisions are slowly disappearing, and established systems are starting to break down, making it challenging to learn what this new world means to all of us.

When it is easy to become a friend of someone who does not live in our neighborhood or even our country, our assumptions about other people start to change. Similarly, the UX research and design professions are seeing a shift that edges us beyond the boundaries within which we live and work, forcing us to look outside our window when designing and improving the products and services we work on. Read More

Over the past few decades, we have seen a steady expansion in the number of people who design or evaluate the quality of the user experience of digital products. The popularization of the personal computer in business and at home, the explosion of the Web and Internet applications, and the sudden presence of computer interfaces in everything from medical systems to voting stations to home entertainment centers has greatly accelerated the growth of the user experience (UX) movement.

The swelling ranks among professionals, academics, and students in user experience provide the potential for a large and diverse global community. However, collaboration among these various constituencies within user experience is neither as widespread nor as easy as it should be. Professional associations, their local chapters, and ad hoc local groups have done much to bring these people together, but the specter of competition among these associations and groups threatens the emergence of a true UX community. Read More