Towards Professionalization in an Online Community of Emerging Occupation (Kou & Gray)

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Kou, Yubo, and Colin M. Gray. “Towards Professionalization in an Online Community of Emerging Occupation.” Proceedings of the 2018 ACM Conference on Supporting Groupwork – GROUP 18, Jan. 2018, pp. 322–334., doi:10.1145/3148330.3148352.

May 3, 2020

This article defines UX practitioners as an emerging occupation through case study analysis in an online community.

Abstract

  • “but these occupations lack clear boundaries and have yet to develop into a profession with a specified, coherent body of knowledge”
    • I want to understand their body of knowledge by examining how it is managed in their practice
  • In this paper, the authors “investigate an online UX community to understand how UX practitioners specify their occupational knowledge and professional boundaries”

Introduction

  • Computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW)

“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”
  • This paper also examines the role of online communities in professionalization

Related Work / Literature

  • Occupations = “represent the organization of productive labor into the social roles by which tasks are performed”
  • Professions = “organized occupational groups whose members have shared identity, commitment, as well as control over defining and regulating their work”
  • Professionalization = “the process whereby an occupation works toward becoming a profession”
  • UX as an Emerging Occupation:
    • UX has a close association to HCI and interaction design
    • 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”
    • This implies that UX design for products drives competitive advantage for organizations
    • Academic institutions are trying to meet the demands of rapid job opportunities in in UX design;
    • Great situation analysis:

“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”

  • The way UX designers manage, navigate, create, share knowledge may be influenced by the disciplinary backgrounds they come from
  • Professionalization of Occupational Practices
    • “indicates that a specific occupational group is able to establish a “market monopoly,” or exercise control over certain services that excludes other occupations.”
    • Over time, occupations may require “laws that limit access to practice to practitioners based on specific levels of training”
    • Professional societies are a sign of professionalization; they establish standards, ethics, follow breakthroughs
    • “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?
    • Traditional institutions, such as universities and colleges, play a role in facilitating the process of practitioners entering a professional field
    • Through professionalization, practitioners “claim a specific body of knowledge and skill” with standards or practice and policies to membership
    • Professionalization is not suited for all occupations
    • Based on this description of professionalization, UX is going through the process of professionalization
  • Professionalization and the Development of Online Communities of Practice (CoPs)
    • Online CoPs “create opportunities and infrastructure for professional learning”
    • Theories in CoPs can be used to understand the informal learning behaviours of UX practitioners in an online communities and examine the development of occupational professionalization.

Method

  • Case study methodology was used; single CS on one bounded system; Reddit
  • Online UX Community Under Study:
    • ‘/r/userexperience’ — had most conversations (threads) in a 13 month period
  • Data Collection
    • PHP to retrieve posts, metadata, SQL database; suitable for quantitative research
    • 1,790 posts
    • 11,373 comments
    • January 19, 2016 to February 16, 2017
    • 2,933 users

Data Analysis

  • Posts that had at least 1 comment for analysis
  • 670 posts with 11,373 comments
  • Thematic analysis
  • Researchers prompted the online community with questions on “how UX practitioners in this community defined and discussed UX knowledge”
  • Researchers read the answers and met weekly to discuss relevant themes
  • Relevant themes include:
    • UX as an emerging occupation (ex. professional identity of UX professionals)
    • Selection of entry points of career paths of becoming a UX professional
    • General public’s understanding of UX
    • Overarching theme was “the movement towards professionalization of UX through defining, redefining, and specifying boundaries around UX knowledge.”

“Keeping the central question of professionalization in mind, we began using an open coding approach to understand how the statements of UX practitioners were related to the production, development, and circulation of UX knowledge. Through memoing and constant comparison with existing codes [13], we iteratively and inductively developed a list of codes. We then used axial coding to connect and consolidate discovered codes, which were eventually developed into three major interactional themes: highlighting the emerging nature of UX, specifying UX knowledge, and enhancing societal recognition.”

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
  • They also expressed the desire and need for “the body of UX knowledge and its relevance for industry become concrete and bounded”
  • They suggested strategies for “practitioners to increase the recognition of UX as a unique approach to industry partners and the general public.”
    • This research validates the need to understand how UX practitioners by their activities in pertinence to knowledge management

Findings: Highlighting the Emerging Nature of UX

  • “UX is a value for the success of companies”
  • The term UX design is used inconsistently because it covers broad domains
  • The term for UX design will be replaced by more specific titles
    • It may be important to first get an understanding of how the UX designer (interviewee) defines UX design and his/her particular skill within UX design
  • UX is popular in technology-related industries
  • “UX” is placed in job titles without fully understanding what it covers to make it sound trendy and attract applicants
  • “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
  • UX practitioners face challenges of constantly having to show their value to the organization
  • There are cases where project members undermine UX designers’ decisions and instructions, which are examples of tensions and knowledge gaps between UX and other disciplinary knowledge
  • UX designers’ complaints and dissatisfaction with how their role is perceived is a sign of efforts towards professionalization
    • I should look for how their moments of frustration relate to the way UX knowledge is managed

Findings: Specifying UX knowledge

  • Three major activities where practitioners sought to specify UX knowledge:
    • “Essential UX knowledge and skills that made this occupation unique; not merely a cobbling together of existing occupational perspectives and knowledge”
    • Criteria or standards for conducting UX work
    • How UX work contrasts with other occupations
  • This research categorizes three types of UX knowledge based on data analysis
  • 1: “Stressing the Uniqueness and Importance of UX
    • You need a combination of contrasting skills, which makes UX designers unique
    • Ex. logical vs empathetic, technical vs personable, design and research…
    • UX research creates value for the organization; research produces successful outcomes
    • UX = philosophy of action
    • 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
    • There are requisite skills needed for niches within UX
      • What makes you different from other niches within UX? How do you associate yourself within a UX niche? Ex. UX design vs research…
  • 2: “Sharing Practical Knowledge”
    • Standard UX tools that UX practitioners “shall” master:
    • Photoshop, Illustrator, Sketch…
    • What are tools that UX designers should know? What tools mentioned by a UX candidate would trigger a warning? What tools do you consider outdated in the UX community?
    • How to enter the field is practical UX knowledge shared by experienced practitioners; they express that you don’t need formal postsecondary education to enter the UX field. The benefits of postsecondary education are the credibility of being disciplined to explore different disciplines and contribute to a field of knowledge through research
  • 3: “Conducting Boundary Work”
    • This group of knowledge tries to “draw clear lines between UX and other related concepts or fields”
    • UX is “designing for a person’s experience specifically”; it is not about the visual design which only focuses on making system efficient; doesn’t focus on the entire experience of an individual
    • UX is seen as an approach that can be used in various contexts and purposes
    • UX is an approach, and UI is the application
    • So far, 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.

Findings: Enhancing Societal Recognition

  • Many comments prompted conversations on how to increase awareness of their role and value within organizations; there’s a need for this in the UX community
  • Ex. strategy; conduct user testing to prove why product design is unsuccessful and UX process is required
  • UX practitioners want to know how to describe their field of work to general audience

Discussion

  • How do you describe what you do to:
    • UX designers
    • UX practitioners
    • Someone in a different department at your workplace
    • A family member
  • What goal(s) are driving your career decisions? By pursuing this role as a UX designer, how will it help you achieve your goal? Is UX knowledge being collected for a greater purpose than UX design itself?
  • This paper does not “presume a final, optimal state [of UX]”
  • UX is still going “towards professionalization”
  • There are “call for more research to understanding the actual practices of practitioners”

Discussion: “The Role of Online Communities in Professionalization”

  • This study is proof that there is knowledge-sharing potential in online communities for occupations in the process of professionalization
  • Online communities allow experienced and non-experienced members to interact more easily than traditional in-person CoPs
  • 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
    • What common interests do less experienced designers have? What common interests do more experienced designers have?

Discussion: “Implications for Policymaking”

  • “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.”
    • My research to understand the body of UX knowledge is contributing towards the process of UX professionalization
  • 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”

Conclusion

  • As I conduct my research, I can expect to find various themes on the definition of UX as this field is an emerging occupation
  • 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