Community: UX News

In our increasingly connected world of 2012, we have more ways of continually learning to better understand, communicate, live, and work with each other, both locally and globally. The old boundaries, borders, and divisions are slowly disappearing, and established systems are starting to break down, making it challenging to learn what this new world means to all of us.

When it is easy to become a friend of someone who does not live in our neighborhood or even our country, our assumptions about other people start to change. Similarly, the UX research and design professions are seeing a shift that edges us beyond the boundaries within which we live and work, forcing us to look outside our window when designing and improving the products and services we work on. Read More

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

I consider myself to be an advocate for the development of a coherent information architecture (IA) practice. However, my words would fall on deaf ears without the groundwork that many other industry contributors have laid. In fact, many of you who are reading this column are probably contributors to IA practice at some level. I am also an active practitioner and researcher in UX design—and thus, am a contributor to the field of UX design as well, just as many of you are. Others reading this article may be contributors to the field of interaction design. As active contributors to our professional practices, we help to sustain the fields of information architecture, interaction design, and user experience.

Information architecture, interaction design, and UX design are three major practices that have significantly evolved our approach to creating well-designed digital products and services. This hasn’t happened by chance. Industry wide, our collective efforts have promoted the maturity of our respective fields, making this evolution possible. Read More