by Leah Buley
• IXDA: www.ixda.com/discussion
• IA Institute: http://lists.iainstitute.org/listinfo.cgi/iai-members-iainstitute.org/
• SIGCHI: www.sigchi.org/connect/mailing-lists
• Anthrodesign: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/anthrodesign
• Stack Exchange: http://ux.stackexchange.com/
Social networks can also be a good place to find an online discussion. LinkedIn has thousands (yes, thousands) of groups with a focus on UX (see Figure 4.8). Many of them are quite large. Do a search for “UX” in the groups section of LinkedIn to get started. Twitter can also be a great resource for connecting to others in the user experience community. Doing a search for “UX” will point you toward lots of experienced UX practitioners who regularly tweet about the field. You’ll also find plenty of great general UX resources, such as UX companies, UX job lists, and feeds that aggregate the latest UX news and methods.
FIGURE 4.8
Linkedin has nearly 5,000 UX groups.
Meet-Ups and Locals
Many cities have local groups with their own active programs of events and meet-ups. Some events are topical and deliberately focused on learning (book clubs or bringing in outside speakers, for example). Some are purely social and geared toward giving people opportunities to meet and mingle. In either case, these are fantastic occasions to gain professional connections, talk shop, and trade war stories. To see if there are local chapters and events in your area, start with an Internet search. Or you may be able to find others in your area by posting to one of the discussion lists cited earlier.
If there doesn’t appear to be a local group in your area, consider starting one. Post a note or invitation on one of the discussion lists, and see if there are any takers. Or, if you know of other companies in your area that do UX work, consider reaching out and introducing yourself to see if there are others who might be interested in co-hosting a meet-up. If there are schools or universities in your area with formal programs in user experience or even related disciplines like HCI, graphic design, or information science, get in touch with them.
NOTE CONSIDER HOSTING A LOCAL MEET-UP
Brian is a team of one who started a local IXDA chapter. He has found that in addition to putting him in touch with other UX professionals, it has actually sparked more interest in UX in his organization. His current manager and his previous manager both now attend IXDA meetings with him, and he’s talking with his company about the possibility of sponsoring a future IXDA event. This is a great approach because it not only makes you feel less isolated as a UX team of one, but it also helps your co-workers see that UX is part of a larger trend that goes well beyond the walls of your organization.
Mentors and Buddies
Some professional associations offer mentorship programs, where you can pair up with someone who is more experienced and establish an ongoing relationship to seek guidance, wisdom, and periodic sanity checks. Or, if you’d like to share your own experiences to help another practitioner, you can volunteer as a mentor. Either way, you are guaranteed to learn more about how to balance perspective, people skills, and practical expertise. Again, check your professional association’s website to see if this service is offered.
If it isn’t, consider looking to the people you already know. Is there someone you met in the professional community who might make a good mentor? Why not ask her? Or maybe someone you work with might be helpful. This person doesn’t necessarily have to be a UX-savvy individual. Even someone who can help you examine and evolve the way you position your work for maximum effectiveness can be a tremendous support.
The Rule of Threes
Here’s a fun fact. Social network theory has a concept called the Rule of Threes, which states that you’re likely to feel a network effect at up to three degrees of separation. All kinds of things spread according to the Rule of Threes: obesity, happiness, and jobs. It’s a well-known fact that most people get jobs from someone they know, for example, through their networks (see Figure 4.9). It’s a less well-known fact that most of these jobs come from someone who is only weakly connected to you—for example, not someone who you currently see or work with on a regular basis. It stands to reason, then, that if you want to increase your opportunities, you need to grow your second and third ring networks. Becoming a part of a professional community is how you do it.
FIGURE 4.9
The bigger your professional community, the more opportunities you’re likely to encounter.
Continuing Education
One reason why continual growth is a good idea for teams of one (or indeed, any UX practitioner) is that the field is changing fast. Maybe you started out focusing on the Web, and then gradually discovered that now you need to conduct research and design for mobile. Tomorrow, it might be tablet, or even device-independent connected service strategies. The simple truth is that technology is a fast-changing field, and since you are responsible for designing people’s experiences with technology, you need to be able to move fast, too. To keep up with the pace of change, UX teams of one can benefit from a variety of continuing education options, ranging from classroom learning in degree granting programs to online education in the comfort of your own home.
Online Resources
You can find an abundance of informative, well-written online newsletters and magazines that focus on UX, which you can sign up to receive by email. These magazines are a more curated alternative to a discussion list, but they share the same virtue of authentic content from fellow user experience professionals. Here are some of the most popular ones:
• UX Booth: www.uxbooth.com/
• UX Matters: www.uxmatters.com/
• A List Apart: www.alistapart.com/
• Boxes and Arrows: www.boxesandarrows.com/
• Smashing Magazine: www.smashingmagazine.com/
• Core77: www.core77.com/
• .Net Magazine: www.netmagazine.com
• UIE Newsletter: www.uie.com/uietips/
• Adaptive Path Blog: www.adaptivepath.com/ideas
For more guided learning in the comfort of your home or office, online seminars or learning modules can pack a lot of information in an hour or two of dedicated learning (and provide tangible how-to’s and examples). Online learning generally gives good value for your buck. Many resources are free. The ones that charge tend to be relatively inexpensive (far less than the cost of attending a conference or taking an in-person class). And because it’s online, if you know other people are interested in this information, too, you can get them together with a projector and some speakers and learn together. Many of the online content providers know that this happens and tacitly encourage it. To find online learning options, check out the following providers:
• User Interface Engineering Virtual Seminars: www.uie.com/events/virtual_seminars/
• Rosenfeld Media Virtual Seminars: http://rosenfeldmedia.com/seminars/
• Lynda.com: www.lynda.com/
• TreeHouse: http://teamtreehouse.com/
• Coursera: www.coursera.org/ (Coursera is not specifically a user experience resource; they host online resources on pretty much any topic you can think of. However, there are several courses that focus on topics relating to user experience.)
• AIGA Webinars: www.aiga.org/resources/
• Slideshare: www.slideshare.net
Another great resource is videos of conference proceedings, which are often posted online once a conference is over.
Books
Kudos to you for picking up this book. Of course, there are lots of other great ones out there. In fact, a handful of publishers specialize in books of relevance to user experience professionals. Browsing their catalogs may turn you on to new titles that you were unaware of. To get started, check out the following publishers:
Rosenfeld Media (see Figure 4.10): Publisher of user experience titles exclusively (and the publisher of this book). Founded by one of the authors (Lou Rosenfeld) of a foundational text of our field, Inform
ation Architecture for the World Wide Web (http://rosenfeldmedia.com/).
New Riders (see Figure 4.11): An imprint of Peachpit Press. Peachpit publishes titles on a variety of topics for creative professionals, such as desktop publishing, multimedia, Web design, and general computing. The New Riders imprint contains a number of titles of particular relevance to UX professionals (www.peachpit.com/imprint/index.aspx?st=61074).
FIGURE 4.10
Rosenfeld Media.
FIGURE 4.11
New Riders.
O’Reilly Media (see Figure 4.12): Not so much a publisher as a media empire, O’Reilly not only publishes books on basically every topic you can think of, but they also host an impressive array of conferences (http://oreilly.com/).
A Book Apart (see Figure 4.13): The publishing arm of the popular website A List Apart, A Book Apart publishes short books principally on topics related to Web design. This is a relatively new publisher, so their catalog is still growing, but their early publications are timely, well written, and to the point (www.abookapart.com/).
FIGURE 4.12
O’reilly Media.
FIGURE 4.13
A Book Apart.
Conferences
For what you pay, conferences provide a straight shot of inspiration, information, and networking in one very effective and compressed chunk of time. Going to conferences is a little like going to a professional spa, where you refresh and revitalize your energies for the work to come. If possible, I recommend going to at least one conference a year, and even trying to identify your “home” conference—the one that you attend consistently and where you can catch up with your UX buddies every year. Having a home conference also enables you to see how the content and issues in the field evolve over time. You can find a comprehensive list of conferences at www.interaction-design.org or www.lanyrd.com.
So, how do you cover the cost of traveling to and attending a conference?
• Start by asking if your employer will pay for it. Many companies recognize conferences as a beneficial form of continuing professional development and are willing to cover your attendance as a reasonable part of continuing education costs.
• If your employer won’t cover the costs, don’t give up. Many conferences provide opportunities to go for free or at a reduced cost if you are willing to volunteer some of your time to help out during the conference. Send the conference organizers an email asking if they have any volunteer opportunities.
• Another way to attend a conference and get some or potentially all of your costs covered is to be a presenter. This may sound intimidating if you have never spoken in public before, but many conferences openly solicit submissions for talks, workshops, and poster sessions, and they’re often seeking to balance known speakers with new voices. Check the conference website for information about submissions.
NOTE FINDING YOUR CONFERENCE PRESENTATION
Don’t think you have a talk in you? Spend some time brainstorming topics that you know the most about. Or think about projects you’ve worked on that are interesting or notable (either because they went really well, went really poorly, had some new angle or technique, or some combination of all of the above). Pick your two or three best ideas, give each one a title and a few sentences of description, and submit them to the conference organizers.
You might be surprised by what happens. In my experience, once you’ve got your title, your abstract, and a looming deadline, the rest of the content pretty much takes care of itself. But if you’d like some inspiration for how to structure your talk, check out past conference presentations if they are available online, or sites like Slideshare, to see examples of what works well in other people’s presentations.
The most beneficial thing you can do at a conference is to meet other people (see Figure 4.14). It is often said that the best part of the conference happens in the hallways, but only if you make an effort. How? Attend the happy hours, dinners, and informal mixers that the organizers inevitably offer as opportunities for socializing. Introduce yourself when you sit down next to someone at a session. Be friendly and forward, even if just for a few days, and you’ll be glad you did.
FIGURE 4.14
Networking and meeting people is the best part of the conference.
Classes and Courses
In person, group-based training can cost a bit more than an online seminar, but can also serve as a boot camp or intensive to take you quickly from a newbie level of knowledge to expert. These options tend to be more limited, but the organizations that do them often schedule tours, taking their curriculum to different parts of the world. Check out:
• Cooper U: www.cooper.com/#training:introduction
• Adaptive Path UX Intensive: http://ux-intensive.com/
• User Interface Engineering UX Immersion: www.uie.com/events/#uxim
• Nielsen Norman Group: www.nngroup.com/
• Rosenfeld Media Workshops: http://rosenfeldmedia.com/events/
• General Assembly: http://generalassemb.ly/
Local colleges, universities, and community colleges may also offer relevant courses that you can sign up for without being required to enroll in a degree program. Check your local school’s catalogs under design or computer science to see what courses are available.
Finally, many conferences offer optional workshops before or after the conference where, for a little extra money, you can get comparable training tacked on to your conference.
Degree Programs
While the UX field tends to welcome self-taught folks with open arms, eventually you may decide you want to go back to school. This is a good idea if you’re interested in becoming more specialized in the field of UX, or if you want to earn more money. Although our field is still somewhat new, many more formal education options exist now than did even just a few years ago. Here is a list of some of the established and well-regarded schools that offer graduate degrees in UX-related disciplines as of this writing.
North America
• Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, U.S.
• Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT), Chicago, Illinois, U.S.
• Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, New York, U.S.
• University of Washington iSchool, Seattle, Washington, U.S.
• Berkeley iSchool, Berkeley, California, U.S.
• University of Indiana, Bloomington, Indiana, U.S.
• Stanford, Palo Alto, California, U.S.
• MIT Media Lab, Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S.
• Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia, U.S.
• NYU Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP), New York, New York, U.S.
• University of Toronto School of Information and Interactive Media Lab, Toronto, Canada
• Laval University School of Design, Quebec City, Canada
South America
• Universidade Positivo, Curitiba, Brazil
• Universidad del Pacifico de Chile, Concepción, Chile
Europe
• Royal College of Art (RCA), London, England
• City University London, London, England
• Middlesex University, London, England
• The University of York, York, England
• Limburg Catholic University College (KHLim Experience Design Lab), Diepenbeek, Belgium
• University of Applied Sciences, Potsdam, Germany
• Delft University of Technology, Delft, Netherlands
• Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design, Copenhagen, Denmark
• Umeå Institute of Design, Umeå, Sweden
• Malmö University, Malmö, Sweden
• The Domus Academy, Milan, Italy
Asia and Australia
• Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, India
• Korean Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), Daejeon, Republic of Korea
• Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong
• Nanyang Technological Univers
ity, Singapore
• The University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia
• The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia
Be sure to do your own research as well. This list is far from exhaustive and new programs are cropping up all the time.
In Your Organization
For some, your own organization may not be the first option that comes to mind. You are trying to help them grow a user experience practice. How can you expect them to help you? Even though they may not be experts in user experience, well-intentioned employers often have programs and structures in place that are designed to help their employees continue to grow and ensure that their work contributes meaningfully to the organization’s goals. Depending on the company, general management training may also be an option, or training in specific skills, such as time management or communication. Any training that gives you a chance to meet other people from around the organization can be worthwhile, too. Sometimes you learn new things about people when you have an opportunity to work with them outside the context of a project.
The first place to start is with your written goals. In some respects, goals are the agreement that an individual and an employer make concerning what that individual will focus on in the next year, and where they can expect support. Consider making user experience work and training an explicit goal. This will make others (e.g., your boss and your boss’s boss) aware that this is a priority for you, and will invite a useful conversation about the lengths to which your organization will go to support this goal.