Organized UX Professionalism: Integration of UX Professionals and their Work in Organizations

Organizing and managing are increasingly considered as issues for user experience (UX) professionals to deal with. We propose the term ‘organized UX professionalism’ to help reveal what we argue is a uniqueness in organized professionalism for UX. We examined the phenomenon of organized UX professionalism through a survey of the views of 423 UX professionals across five countries. The results show that organized UX professionalism consist of a management-minded work orientation, innovative tool use, highly social best practices, organizational user centeredness, community participation, and the maturity of the UX and usability concepts in the local society. Surprisingly, UX professionals resist changing their definition of usability and UX toward organizational and human-oriented definitions. We discuss possible actions of returning to a certified usability professional versus going beyond the idea of the UX profession. The notion of organized UX professionalism can help conceptualize, measure, develop, and manage the work of UX professionals.