Note: In the past 2 weeks, I focused on diving deeper into CoPs, VCs, and CoPs for UX designers.
CoP: Chapter 7: Downsides of CoPs
- Narcissism – “they pursue their own agenda with little regard for what teams or business units really need in terms of expertise or capability” (143)
- In cliques, “relationships dominate other concerns”
- Needs meaningful interactions, include new generation members, apprenticeship, mentorship, multi-membership
- Practice places members on a closed paradigm; this makes me think about how all designers speak about their work as if they’re going to save the world…
- Boundaries of practice STICK and LEAK
- Moving knowledge across disciplinary boundaries is difficult; knowledge does not necessarily apply to other communities; it is also hard to describe UX knowledge as something explicit apart of the specific action
- It’s easier for practitioners in competing organizations to gain expertise than different departments in your own organization to gain understanding of specific products
CoP: Chapter 8: Measuring and Managing Value Creation
- (161) Definition of CoP: “Practices are self-governing groups of practitioners who dedicate part of their discretionary time to contribute to the stewardship of their shared area of expertise”; CoPs are largely held voluntarily
- Definition of knowledge system: “inchoate knowledge assets (undeveloped ideas, latent skills, isolated techniques) are made into accessible knowledge resources”
- Systematic anecdotal evidence
- Stories/narratives help describe / understand the causality between knowledge producing activities and applications that create value
- What I need to extract from interviews
- Elements of the knowledge story:
- Initial knowledge development activity to innovate, learn a skill, or solve a problem
- The knowledge resource generated by this activity (ex. new insights, methods, relationships)
- How this resource was applied to create value
- What would’ve happened without the community?
- Narratives should be collected systematically:
- Top-down: identify communities that meet business strategy objectives
- Bottom-up: follow the communities and all of their activities
- This can be a method of data collection in GTM
- Can NARRATIVES become the outcome of my GT? (Instead of a conceptual model?)
- “stories must be collected systematically because one story may not be representative of all activities or all possible outcomes” (171) — this is relevant for GTM research
- Interview techniques for collecting stories
- Community members will at first find it difficult to identify value created from their community
- Ask them to describe how they solved an internal problem / client project with others
- Ask them to talk about a time when they shared an idea or taught how to use a tool, and how the person accomplished something with that new idea / skill
- What would the team do if you never provided them with an idea / information?
- Before asking any questions, establish a good background understanding of how the community, organization, and team operates (ex. history, conflicts, goals, etc.)
- These can all be overarching categories of other questions
CoP: Chapter 10: Reweaving the World; Communities beyond organizations
- Communities are not confined to a single organization
- Communities in business to business clusters
- Developers x UX x UI x UX researchers x users x marketing… (internal)
- UX x users x hardware x service stakeholders (external)
- Communities in consumer markets
- Customers also share knowledge with each other (ex. DIY blogs)
- Communities across firms
- Ex. mergers, joint ventures, alliances
Virtual Communities; Sense of Community
- Within VCs there is a “sense of community” (SoC); this was studied dby McMillan and Chavis. There is way to look for SoCs in virtual communities as well.
- Elements of SoC:
- Membership — belonging
- Boundaries — of who’s in / not
- Emotional safety — result of 1 and 2
- Personal investment — strength of ties = more values
Sense of Community is a feeling that members have of belonging, a feeling that members matter to one another and to the group, and a shared faith that members’ needs will be net through their commitment together.
McMillan and Chavis, 1986, page 9
- Sense of Community in virtual communities can be found through examining:
- Common Domain of Interest
- Continuous Interaction
- Emotional Support
- Shared History and Culture
- Virtually Constructed Identity
- There is a theory that in one becomes more influential by being open to being influenced first, and then contributing back through participation (in VCs); I can expect to find influential UX designers are actively giving back to their community
- SoC in VCs develop over time—how they develop can examined in the following ways:
- Topicality to Domain
- Information to Interaction
- Information to Affection
- Story to History
- Anonymity to Identity
- It was interesting to see this happening throughout the DesignX Remote Design Conference Week. The VC was short lived (5 days), but if it were longer I think the SoC in the VC would have died down. There was no plan to keep the SoC in the VC ongoing past the scheduled events.
Virtual Communities; Design Considerations for Virtual Communities
- Definition of VC: “A virtual community is a group of people with a common interest or purpose who communicate online in an organized, sustained way”
- This paper aims to examine how specific design elements used in VC platforms provide benefits to the user and influence the VC’s overall success
- Reasons for participating in VCs:Exchange information; most popular
- Social support
- Forge friendships
- Recreation
- Common interest in community’s primary topic (domain)
- Liking design features available in the virtual community (user friendly)
- VC participants engage with users that are similar to themselves, and this creates the perception that VCs are “melting pots”
- Social psychology theories have been integrated into VC design:
- Common identity (for large VCs) and common bond theory (for small VCs)
- This conceptual model dives deeper from Ren at al.’s (2007) studies to understanding how design features affect VC user behaviour and impact
- Could a conceptual model such as this be an outcome of my GT?
- Common Bond and Common Identity Theory
- “Prentice et al. (1994) characterize common bond groups as those whose members develop attachments to individual group members whereas common identity groups form group identity attachments. Since then, research has confirmed the existence of common bond and common identity groups online (Sassenberg, 2002). Understanding the distinction between common bond and common identity theory lays the groundwork for helping us to identify the types of interactions facilitated by different types of design features.”
- It’s interesting to notice all these features existing in popular web based services: Figma, Slack, Miro, Spotify, Twitch…
Remote Design Week Thoughts
- Overall, this conference focused on hosting presentations on how companies have successfully adopted to remote work processes and tools they use to conduct synchronous and asynchronous communication and activities
- There is evidence of knowledge sharing on digital collaboration tools where designers leave informal notes and annotations on the rationale behind their sketches and design decisions
- Critique sessions are a time for knowledge sharing where designers work collaboratively towards the same goal of making a successful product
- Collaborative tool companies (Figma) document best practices on how to user their product for different stages of the design process; this explicit knowledge sharing lacks the nuances of problem solving through knowledge sharing
- I found that there was lack of diversity in how designers are adjusting to remote work practice
Towards Professionalization in an Online Community of Emerging Occupation (Kou & Gray
- This article defines UX practitioners as an emerging occupation through case study analysis in an online community.
- In this paper, the authors “investigate an online UX community to understand how UX practitioners specify their occupational knowledge and professional boundaries”
- This paper validates the need for my research in this field
“As shifts in technological capability continue to shape the types of occupations and professions that exist, there is a need for more research that examines the role of online communities in supporting, shaping, and defining professionalization processes in relation to emergent occupations.”
- UX design is recognized as an emerging occupation that is “in the process of professionalization because it lacks a coherent body of disciplinary knowledge and only very recently have a few universities recognized the necessity to create UX academic programs at the undergraduate level”
- Domains of UX design “exceed the focus areas of related disciplines such as marketing, graphic design, interaction design, or product design. More recently, the incorporation of UX into digital and physical products has been considered a strategic advantage in knowledge-based companies”
“Despite rapid job growth, UX faces substantial learning and educational challenges due to a lack of consensus over required disciplinary knowledge. Few higher education institutions have developed UX-specific undergraduate academic programs, and graduate UX academic programs have roots in and thus are heavily influenced by distinct disciplinary traditions such as computer science, library science, and information science. Although licensure and certification programs have become more common and accessible in recent years, their legitimacy and usefulness is still contested among practitioners. Consequently, newcomers and enthusiasts find few concrete paths to become a UX professional; and existing practitioners must continuously maintain and develop their UX competency.”
“UX is interdisciplinary, drawing from many disciplinary perspectives, identifying common problems, and generating new knowledge [35,40]. The UX discipline has absorbed a wide range of knowledge, theories, methodologies from disciplines such as computer science, engineering, sociology, and psychology, resulting in a fusion of interests related to interaction and service”
- “professionalization drivers include the desire of the occupational groups that were previously marginalized to seek more power and control and obtain higher social status”; is UX design trying to gain more social status? How is making UX skills accessible through academic programs influencing the social status of UX design as a profession?
- Through professionalization, practitioners “claim a specific body of knowledge and skill” with standards or practice and policies to membership
- Case study methodology was used; single CS on one bounded system; Reddit
- Overall, research has found that UX designers are using the online community to look for 3 types of knowledge:
- Stressing the Uniqueness and Importance of UX
- Sharing practical knowledge
- Conducting boundary work
- Findings
- UX practitioners in the community agree that UX is “still in a developmental stage in terms of professionalization”; I wonder how this has changed over the course of 5+ years
- The term UX design is used inconsistently because it covers broad domains; The term for UX design will be replaced by more specific titles
- “UX” is a buzz word exploited by companies to appear as “following newest trends and competing in showing bigger diversity numbers.”
- Companies that use “UX” without understanding what it is, is a sign that UX knowledge is not widely available across organizations, even if they do have qualified UX employees
- There are niches within UX; ex. UX researcher, UX designer; different organizations have niches if they believe that specializations within UX is necessary for the success of their products
- UX is seen as an approach that can be used in various contexts and purposes
- UX is an approach, and UI is the application
- GTM? In this research, the researcher is pulling out comments from threads and identifying different themes of how UX is perceived by UX practitioners. As comments are categorized in themes, nuances within themes are found.
- This study shows that newcomers and experienced members use different discourses; newcomers ask questions on how to enter the field, and experienced members dive deep into discussing challenges and future directions in UX
- “For professionalization to occur, there needs to be a general recognition that such work—if it is to be sustained and made consistent—requires a specialized body of knowledge that can be obtained only through formalized procedures such as training, education, or licensure.” Therefore, My research to understand the body of UX knowledge is contributing towards the process of UX professionalization. Afterall, I am interested in my research because I don’t understand UX as a profession.
- Interesting: “While universities are beginning to create relevant programs to address this gap, these programs often reside in traditional disciplinary spaces including library science and computer science, thus taking on different (and sometimes contradictory) areas of focus.”
- Occupations cannot develop into a professionalization “if disciplinary discourses are highly decentralized”. So, is it safe to foresee that the term UX will no longer be relevant as its current pattern of decentralized development keeps up? Are schools trying to centralize UX practices to make it a legitimate profession?
- This research shows that online CoPs for UX designers are most helpful to understand how UX is developing into a profession; I may not find CoPs being used to share specific best practices for UX designers (because knowledge is “stuck” to a practice and therefore hard to make explicit)
Things to read next
- Web article: What a UX Career Looks Like Today (NN Group)
- User Experience Careers Report (NN Group)
- Crain, Patrick A., and Brian P. Bailey. “Share Once or Share Often?: Exploring How Designers Approach Iteration in a Large Online Community.” Proceedings of the 2017 ACM SIGCHI Conference on Creativity and Cognition – C&C 17, June 2017, pp. 80–92., doi:10.1145/3059454.3059476.
Discussion Notes
