Using a practice-led research approach, we seek to understand how UX practitioners remain competent over time, document the sources of knowledge and design methods they rely upon to do their work, and identify mechanisms that encourage the development of community. We do in situ observational work to understand physical dimensions of practice and also document designer interactions in meso-scale on social media.

Currently, we are focused primarily on identifying designerly discourses of UX practitioners on social media sites such as Reddit, Twitter, Stack Exchange, and Facebook. In disentangling these discourses, we have discovered substantial complexity in relation to artifact presentation and critique, negotiation of disciplinary knowledge, emergence and sustainment of designerly identity and competence, and design-focused community norms and practices.

Relevant Publications

Gray, C. M., & Kou, Y. (in press). Co-Producing, Curating, and Defining Design Knowledge in an Online Practitioner Community. CoDesign. https://doi.org/10.1080/15710882.2018.1563193

Kou, Y., & Gray, C. M. (in press). A Practice-Led Account of the Conceptual Evolution of UX Knowledge. In CHI’19: Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. New York, NY: ACM Press. https://doi.org/10.1145/3290605.3300279 [preprint]

Kou. Y., & Gray, C. M. (2018, November). “What do you recommend a complete beginner like me to practice?”: Professional Self-Disclosure in an Online Community. Proceedings of the ACM: Human-Computer Interaction, 2(CSCW), Article 94, 25 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3274363

Kou, Y., & Gray, C. M. (2018, June). Distinctions between the Communication of Experiential and Academic Design Knowledge: A Linguistic Analysis. In Proceedings of the Design Research Society Conference (pp. 1582-1595). Limerick, Ireland: Design Research Society. https://doi.org/10.21606/dma.2017.532

Kou, Y., & Gray, C. M. (2018, June). Exploring the Knowledge Creation Practices of UX Designers on Stack Exchange. In DIS’18 Companion: ACM Conference on Designing Interactive Systems (pp. 69-74)New York, NY: ACM Press.  https://doi.org/10.1145/3197391.3205414

Kou, Y., & Gray, C. M. (2018, January). Towards Professionalization in an Online Community of Emerging Occupation: Discourses among UX Practitioners. In GROUP’18: Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Supporting Group Work. New York, NY: ACM Press. https://doi.org/10.1145/3148330.3148352

Kou, Y., Gray, C. M., Toombs, A. L., & Adams, R. S. (2018, January). Knowledge Production and Social Roles in an Online Community of Emerging Occupation: A Study of User Experience Practitioners on Reddit. In Proceedings of the Hawaii International Conference on Systems Sciences (HICSS). http://hdl.handle.net/10125/50148

Kou. Y., & Gray, C. M. (2017). Supporting Distributed Critique through Interpretation and Sense-Making in an Online Creative Community. In Proceedings of the ACM: Human-Computer Interaction: Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing 2017, 1(2), Article 60, 20 pages. https://dx.doi.org/10.1145/3134695

Brier, J., Gray, C. M., & Kou, Y. (2017, June). In Search of UX Translators: Analyzing Researcher-Practitioner Interactions on Twitter. In DIS’17 Companion: ACM Conference on Designing Interactive Systems (pp. 111-115). New York, NY: ACM Press. http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/3064857.3079129

Gray, C. M., & Kou, Y. (2017, June). UX Practitioners’ Engagement with Intermediate-Level Knowledge. In DIS’17 Companion: ACM Conference on Designing Interactive Systems (pp. 13-17). New York, NY: ACM Press. http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/3064857.3079110

Gray, C. M., & Boling, E. (2016, November). Designers’ Articulation and Activation of Instrumental Design Judgments in Cross-Cultural User Research. In DTRS’11: 11th annual Design Thinking Research Symposium. Copenhagen, DK: Copenhagen Business School.

Gray, C. M. (2016, June). What is the Nature and Intended Use of Design Methods?. In Proceedings of the Design Research Society. Brighton, UK: Design Research Society.

Gray, C. M. (2016, May). “It’s More of a Mindset Than a Method”: UX Practitioners’ Conception of Design Methods. In CHI’16: Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 4044-4055). New York, NY: ACM Press. http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2858036.2858410

Gray, C. M., Toombs, A., & Gross, S. (2015, April). Flow of Competence in UX Design Practice. In CHI’15: Proceedings of the 2015 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 3285-3294). New York, NY: ACM Press. [Awarded Best of CHI Honorable Mention, top 5%]. http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2702123.2702579

Gray, C. M., Stolterman, E., & Siegel, M. A. (2014, June). Reprioritizing the Relationship Between HCI Research and Practice: Bubble-Up and Trickle-Down Effects. In DIS’14: Proceedings of the 2014 CHI Conference on Designing Interactive Systems (pp.725-734). New York, NY: ACM Press. [Awarded Best Paper, top 1%]. http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2598510.2598595

Gray, C. M. (2014, April). Evolution of Design Competence in UX Practice. In CHI’14: Proceedings of the 2014 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1645-1654). New York, NY: ACM Press. http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2556288.2557264