Positive Developments but Challenges Still Ahead: A Survey Study on UX Professionals' Work Practices

This paper describes and gives an overview of User Experience (UX) professionals’ work practices—their environment, practices, tools, and challenges. First, we reviewed 32 empirical studies about usability and UX work to identify key issues in usability and UX work practices. For the identified key issues, we collected data from 422 UX professionals surveyed in five different countries using a comprehensive questionnaire with 62 questions. Our results show that UX professionals individually know about usability and UX concepts, methods, and tools. They typically employ between one and five Human Computer Interaction (HCI) theories on average and use one to three different techniques and tools. On the organizational level, UX is involved from early to late stages and is generally well known within all levels of the organization. On the country and community level, UX professionals generally do not report themselves as belonging to a professional community, despite the fact that the survey was administered via channels of the respective communities in the survey countries. Overall, this survey shows that UX professionals have considerable work experience and strong UX expertise self-confidence. This may be considered as indicating a positive development of the UX profession.