Community: UX News

Venture capitalists (VCs) are now investing significant funding in applications that help businesses to evaluate, measure, and improve their product user experiences. On October 15, 2015, leading UX research and testing SaaS platform UserZoom received $34 million in venture financing, led by TC Growth Partners, with investments from Trident Capital, and StepStone Group. This momentous event demonstrates how important user experience has become to the success of products and the businesses that make them. This is exciting news for the UX community! So we thought this would be the perfect time to interview Alfonso de la Nuez, CEO of UserZoom, who is shown in Figure 1. (If you’re wondering why Alfonso has a basketball poised on the tip of his finger, he won a full scholarship to play on the Varsity basketball team at San Jose State University and is still passionate about the game.) 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

Dirk Knemeyer, shown in Figure 1, is a UX thought leader, an entrepreneur, a game designer, and a former UXmatters columnist. Recently, I had the opportunity to talk with Dirk about his experiences as a UX professional and entrepreneur, as well as his reflections on the state of democracy in the United States and how we can use design thinking to imagine a more participatory form of democratic government. Read More