A Practice-Led Account of the Conceptual Evolution of UX Knowledge

Explore a 21-minute conference talk from the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems that delves into the conceptual evolution of User Experience (UX) knowledge. Examine the challenges and opportunities presented by the rapidly shifting landscape of UX design practice and the existing research-practice gap. Learn about a practice-led approach used to analyze a corpus of question and answer communication on UX Stack Exchange over a nine-year period. Discover how natural language processing techniques and qualitative content analysis were employed to identify a disciplinary vocabulary used by UX designers in this online community. Gain insights into the conceptual trajectories spanning nearly a decade, shedding light on the evolution of UX practice. Understand the implications of these findings for Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) research and UX education. The talk covers various aspects including the emergence of UX as a transdisciplinary context, challenges in UX programs, disciplinary knowledge, the research-practice divide, occupational competency, design education critique, and research questions surrounding UX knowledge and user research.