User Experience Network

This is an archive of information about the User Experience Network.

We want to save the pieces that have long-term value and will still help the user experience community in the years ahead. If you have a suggestion for something else to put in these archives, send us your thoughts via email: archive at uxnet.org.

For many years, we syndicated a subset of content from Putting People First: that blog, and its archives, is still around.

If you want to stay connected with other people who have volunteered for UXnet, you can join a Google group to see what they are involved in and what might come next.

About UXnet

We saw a bright future for user experience, where practitioners of different backgrounds will know how to work well together to design complex products, strategies, communications, and services. User Experience will be commonly understood and accepted by designers as foundational to their work. And User Experience will mature into a cross-disciplinary practice comprised of common language, concepts, methods, and shared wisdom needed to enable collaboration.

UXnet provided access to people and knowledge across the user experience community. We tried to provide the infrastructure, tools and information to increase awareness and accelerate the growth and value of user experience.

Over the years, we supported a network of local ambassadors and other local leaders, who promoted a cross-disciplinary view of UX and served their local UX community in many different ways. "Think global, act local." We maintained a calendar to help aggregate local meetings, conferences, training and other events to help bridge the gaps across different aspects of UX. We worked with different professional organizations to help them collaborate with other groups (sometimes as simple as hosting a meeting at one association's conference to help them connect with people from other associations). We also explored ways to establish a "volunteer currency" for the UX community and how to build a UX directory to act as the foundation for it.

We defined User Experience (abbreviated: UX) as the quality of experience a person has when interacting with a specific design. This can range from a specific artifact, such as a cup, toy or website, up to larger, integrated experiences such as a museum or an airport.

Local leaders

Volunteers are still working locally to support the user experience community in different parts of the world. Here are some of the groups where UXnet local leaders are still active:

This is not all of the local UX groups that were started by UXnet local ambassadors but are still around. If you want to add something to the list, send us details via email: archive at uxnet.org .

We also started a Medical Industry Group.

Other volunteer opportunties

There are many other places where you can volunteer your time to advance the user experience community. Here are just a few that we recommend (with links to their "how to volunteer" pages):