“Organized UX Professionalism” – An Empirical Study and Conceptual Tool for Scrutinizing UX Work of the Future

Abstract

This paper proposes the notion of 'Organized User Experience (UX) Professionalism' to describe the nature of the UX work in organizations and support the development of the UX profession. The conceptual model of Organized UX Professionalism is observed in practice and evaluated using data from a survey of 422 UX professionals in five countries. The model recognizes that the UX profession and work are guided not only by the principles of user experience and usability, but also by organization and management issues. The empirical evidence shows that indeed Organized UX Professionalism consists of a management-minded work orientation, innovative tool use, highly social best practices, organizational user centeredness, community participation, and the maturity of the UX and usability concepts in the local society. The study also shows that UX professionals largely adopt system-oriented definitions of usability and UX, rather than changing their conceptions towards organizational and human-oriented definitions. We discuss implications of the findings and possible actions of returning to 'certified usability professionalism' versus 'going beyond the idea of the UX professionalism' towards organization specific UX only. From the human-work interaction design perspective, we believe that the notion of Organized UX Professionalism helps conceptualize, measure, develop, and manage the work of UX professionals in different social contexts as well as understand the outcomes and role of this work in the organization. Further, we propose a few concrete research directions to continue this research.