Community: The Interaction Design Association (IxDA)

Name: Student No: Module Title: Module Code: William Kennedy 0726885 Multimedia Industry Perspectives CS4047

Description
The IxDA is a professional organisation consisting of interaction designers, user experience professionals, information architects and designers with an interest in interaction design principles and practises. It describes itself as a global network dedicated to the professional practice of Interaction Design and claims on its homepage to have over 20,000 active members at the present time [3]. The main functions of the IxDA homepage are as a discussion forum and job board, though they also claim to support other opportunities and platforms which benefit interaction design as a discipline. Users can register for the site easily, and without the need to provide payment to the IxDA, and there is also no pressure for the user to share their details other than their e-mail address to sign up, though obviously the site becomes more useful to the user as more details are shared as other users can better share information and job opportunities.
Figure 1

Users can choose to share their location, organization info, information about themselves, their blog and social network URLs and their professional status (as a student, consultant, employed recruiter, etc) [Fig. 1]. Indeed, the IxDA itself self-describes as an unorganization [4], in that members are encouraged to self-organize and are not charged a membership fee as is the case in most other professional bodies. IxDA has largely been

successful due to the individual initiative [4] of its membership in organizing local groups of the IxDA, such as IxDA Dublin, IxDA Limerick and IxDA London. These groups are responsible for setting up their own events and gatherings, and are largely self-sufficient within the larger organization.

Main Activities going on Job Board

The IxDA site allows users to post jobs and employment opportunities for other members to browse. [Fig. 2] shows an example of the main job board and the types of opportunities available on the board. Posting a job costs $265 and stays on the job board for 90 days [5]. This ensures that the system stays relevant to users seeking work, and is never clogged with old jobs which are older than 90 days or worthless spam which is often seen on free job sites. The IxDA job board system allows recruiters and hr professionals to provide not only a job title and description, but also the most appropriate field, specialities and job level [6] as can be seen in [Fig. 3]. The site provides a broad range of specialities that recruiters and select to find the right candidate including such diverse skills as CSS, event production, design for social impact, flash programming and even urban planning. This attention to detail, and inclusion of the most relevant (and obscure) specialities makes the IxDA job board a particularly powerful tool for design practitioners seeking work.
Figure 2

Jobs are categorized by their field, for example Interaction Design, Interior Design, Industrial Design, Web Design and Advertising. This allows users to quickly filter out inappropriate jobs for their needs and quickly find more appropriate jobs for themselves. Users can also use the job board to search jobs by keyword and distance in miles from a zip code location. Keywords are directly tied into the content of the post, as well as the specific specialities the recruiter has selected, so for example a user searching for design for social impact as a keyword will find job posts which contain that speciality.

Figure 3

Discussion
One of the main features of the IxDA site is its discussion section [7], which permits members to chat and discuss design issues, professional and work related problems, as well as work opportunities and community events. Discussion topics are categorized as Recent or Hot, which allows users to view new posts in terms of chronological order or popularity. There are also links on this page to the discussion archives [8] and help section [9] which provides an

introduction to the IxDA and its discussion board system. All discussions which take place in the IxDA boards are archived in the discussion archives, which are organized chronologically by year and go back as far as 2003 [Fig. 4] These archives can prove an invaluable source of information for designers faced with tough design decisions, as many of the problems they face may already have been faced by another member in previous years and their discussion can be found in the archives.
Figure 4

Discussion topics can be tagged by the poster, and a tag cloud in the right hand side bar [Fig. 5] allows users to browse through popular tags to find the content that they need. New discussions are also disseminated through the IxDA mailing list, which all members are by default subscribed to. This mailing list can however be unsubscribed to from the main discussion page, allowing the users to avoid clutter in their inbox. Common posts include the challenges of designing for multiple devices [Fig. 6], industry news [Fig. 7] and questions and criticisms of existing interfaces or interaction models [Fig. 8]. Comments on posts are however comparatively rare, with only three of the most recent posts at the time of writing receiving any comments at all. Posts which appear in the Hot [10] section of the discussion board seem, by the very nature of the section, to be more likely to have replies, however these posts are not guaranteed to be new. For example at the time of writing, two posts in the Hot section are shown to have their latest comments dated as being over a month old. It is debatable as to whether this is due to the enduring nature of these topics, or whether the IxDA discussion board simply doesnt have an active enough community to justify such a feature.

Figure 5

Figure 6

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Figure 8

Resources
The IxDA site provides resources in the form of user generated content, links, videos, audio files and tutorials in the resources section of the site [10]. This content is provided by members of the community and draws from numerous sources such as YouTube, Vimeo, blogs and design websites. The content is curated by an administrator to ensure its relevance to the community, and can also be tagged by the submitter for easier searching. The curator filters content into various categories including Career, Tools, Education and Hiring so that users can easily find content which is relevant to their personal goals. [Fig. 9]
Figure 9

The IxDA resources page claims that new resources are reviewed before being accepted to ensure relevance to [their] community [10], however this sort of censorship of content can be seen as a limitation of the community, and a dissinsentive for users to submit new resource content in this section, as opposed to the Discussion forum which is more open and easier to

submit to. Registration or membership is required to post new resources, and the submission tool includes a rich text editor so that users can publish richly formatted content. Images, PDFs and documents under 2MB can also be hosted directly by the IxDA website, however larger files must be hosted off-site. Common off-site hosting includes Slideshare, where users can post their Powerpoint or Keynote presentations, and Scribd, where users can host their documents in an easy to view Flash format. Regardless of where the content is hosted, it is viewed on-site in the form of a post which can be viewed, rated, and commented upon on the IxDA site.

Member Directory
The member directory section of the IxDA [11] allows users to search and browse other members of the IxDA, including their photo and last access date. This is an invaluable tool for both recruiters and interaction designers who want to get in contact with one another, for projects or work opportunities. This section allows users to browse the member directory by professional status, years of experience, country, username, surname and date of last access. For members of the IxDA who have logged in, the members directory allows users to access each others profile, which includes all the information they provided while setting up their account, including their About me information and organisation information. For non-members however, the members directory simply lists their basic information, and a more detailed profile is not available so the functionality and usefulness of this section is somewhat debatable. Non-member users seem to mostly use this section to check when a user has last logged in, what their real name is and if they have a profile image. Users profiles show important information such as their website address, location, level of experience and numbers of posts in the discussion board [Fig. 10]. It also shows what groups the user is part of, such as IxDA New York, IxDA Limerick and IxDA Paris. Users are also able to Subscribe to a users, which means that updates and new posts by this user will be sent directly to their e-mail account. Recent posts by the user can also be accessed via an RSS feed, meaning they can be viewed from anywhere outside of the site or exported to a new site as a feed.

Figure 10

Conference
The IxDA organize a conference every year called Interaction [12], which focuses on issues, problems, opportunities and discussions surrounding the area of interaction design and user experience. Speakers come from all over the world, and often from many different professions such as cognitive psychology, sociology, product design, visual design and information theory. Previous Interaction conferences have taken place in Savannah, Vancouver and Boulder, but the 2012 event in Dublin, Ireland will be the first to take place outside of North America. Speakers at Interaction 12 include Genevieve Bell, Fabian Hemmert, Amber Case, Luke Williams and Jonas Lowgren, and the event will take place in the newly built National Convention Center. IxDA members from all over the world will be travelling to attend Interaction 12, including South America, Australia, India, China, Europe and North America. Unlike the largely self-organizing IxDA community, the Interaction conference is a very corporate affair. Tickets to the event often cost in excess of 500 [13], and the events are highly organized by dedicated and paid staff. Corporate sponsors for Interaction 12 include Google, Microsoft and General Electric, showing the intense level of corporate involvement in the event. While their may seem to be a disparity in the level of the organization as a whole (self-organized into small groups) as opposed to their official conference (professionally organized and corporately sponsored), this disparity can be explained by the need for a singular driving vision in successfully hosting an event such as Interaction 12.

Local
The Local section of the IxDA site includes a Google map [Fig. 11] of local groups from all over the world, showing groups in every continent with large clusters around the east coast of the United States as well as Brazil, Europe and Britain. The pins on this map showing the different groups can be clicked to bring up information on the local group including its location, number of members, number of posts and group coordinator. The main Local page

also include an up to date list of IxDA events taking place in local groups, in order of chronology, with information on the organizing group, its location and the event date and time. Users can also comment on events and contact the event organizer.
Figure 11

The Local section also includes a dedicated groups directory, and groups can be sorted and searched by Country and State/Province. Locations are listed and link to the nearest group, for example the listing for Berlin, Berlin, Germany links to IxDA Berlin. A dedicated events page also gives more advanced control over filtering events, and events can be filtered by country and state/province.

Channels of Communication:
As discussed previously in their own sections, the main channels for communication for IxDA members are the discussion board, job board, local groups and their meet-ups, and the Interaction conference. However we must also realize that the IxDA is not an authoritative body, and local groups often have their own methods of communication. Groups such as IxDA Lansing [14] use their blog to promote and organize their meet-ups and events. Likewise, we can be relatively confident that traditional forms of communication such as email, VOIP and phone are used by some local groups.

Media Reports
The IxDA is mentioned frequently in media and blog reports, both by members inside the IxDA and by media sources from without. Google Blog search shows hundreds of mentions of the IxDA in relation to Interaction Design on blogs over the past year. Local news sites such as Real West Dorset [2] mention the IxDA awards and the sense of community pride which can be gained by a local person or company winning such design awards. Industry news sites such as Core77 [1] report on IxDA activities, IxD jobs and positions within the organization. Interaction design companies such as Cooper [15] blog about IxDA events, for example the Interaction 09 conference, and give feedback, notes, reports on the speakers and topics, and commentary on the event as a whole. Local IxDA groups such as IxDA Lansing [14] use blogs to broadcast their events and share the findings and opinions of their members. Universities and university departments such as the Interaction Design department at the Umea Institute of Design blog about the IxDA and Interaction awards to

inform their students and keep them up to date and in touch with the professional organisation. [17] We can see therefore that the IxDA is widely represented in the online media and blogging community. However, the IxDA seems to be so far underrepresented in traditional media. A Google News search for the IxDA brings up no results from traditional news sources as of writing of this report; however this may well change with the advent of the Interaction 12 conference in Dublin in 2012.

A Day in the Life

A member of the IxDA can generally be expected to be a working professional in the area of interaction design, information architecture or user experience. Therefore I will take for example a hypothetical user experience designer at a large multinational company. Such a designers tasks in an average day would include liaising with engineering teams and various team members to ensure the correct design is coming through to the fruition stages, working with the design team to create new interfaces and interaction models, working with information architects to ensure that the information architecture model of the website or software product is optimal for the user, wireframing and prototyping new designs, and meeting with management, product owners and team leaders. The software our designer uses might include industry standards such as Axure, Omnigraffle, Adobe Creative Suite and HTML 5. Our designer uses online resources such as the IxDA, tutorial sites and blogs to keep his knowledge and skills in these packages up to date, and up to industry standards. This user experience designer can therefore be seen as a holistic problem solver with good communication skills and an ability to work well as part of a large group of smaller teams. As a member of the IxDA, our designer also has access to the wide variety of resources available on the IxDA website, and also the IxDA discussion board where he can raise issues that he or his team is having and get valuable feedback from his industry peers. He may even use the job board to gain a better understanding of what kind of careers were available to him outside of his own organisation. Our user experience designer may also be a member of his local IxDA group, and frequently attends their monthly meetings. At these monthly meetings he is able to meet with his professional peers in a casual environment and swap valuable insights and advice. He also gains valuable knowledge from the wider group discussions which happen within the groups own website, and from the invited speakers who attend some meetings and present new ideas and ways of problem solving. The group design sessions which occur in his IxDA group introduce our designer to new design methodologies, such as IDEO cards, personas and ethnography. He introduced to the importance of sketching ideas at all stages and the idea of always having a design notebook with him to capture moments of clarity or inspiration. Our designer is then able to utilise this valuable knowledge and expertise to improve his own work within the company. Finally, outside of work, our designer interacts with the IxDA community through the discussion board to discover new events and activities which may interest him in his local area. He also uses the discussion board to create relationships with other designers, which he then transfers to his LinkedIn profile to create a valuable professional network. This network will stand to him, not just when he is seeking future employment outside of his organization, but also when he is in need to advice from a peer on a subject that he is not strong in.

References
[1] Coroflot. (2011). The Interaction Design Association (IxDA) is Seeking its First Executive Director . Available: http://www.core77.com/blog/jobs/the_interaction_design_association_ixda_is_seeking_its_fir st_executive_director_20857.asp. [accessed 9/11/11] [2] Hudston, J. (2011). Digital first for Dorset at new Bridport festival. Available: http://www.realwestdorset.co.uk/wordpress/11/2011/digital-first-for-dorset-bridport-openbook-festival-ts-eliot-waste-land-app/. [accessed 9/11/11] [3] Interaction Design Association, IxDA.org, http://ixda.org, [accessed 08/11/11]
[4] Interaction Design Association, IxDA Mission, http://www.ixda.org/about/ixda-mission, [accessed 08/11/11] [5] Interaction Design Association,Opportunities, http://ixda.coroflot.com/public/jobs_browse.asp, [accessed 08/11/11] [6] Interaction Design Association, Post a Job, https://ixda.coroflot.com/public/buy_single_job.asp, [accessed 08/11/11] [7] Interaction Design Association, Recent Discussions, http://www.ixda.org/discussion, [accessed 08/11/11] [8] Interaction Design Association, Discussion Archive, http://www.ixda.org/discussion/archivesummary, [accessed 08/11/11] [9] Interaction Design Association, Help, http://www.ixda.org/help, [accessed 08/11/11] [10] Interaction Design Association, Resources, http://www.ixda.org/resources, [accessed 08/11/11] [11] Interaction Design Association, Member Directory, http://www.ixda.org/members, [accessed 09/11/11] [12] Interaction 12, Home, http://interaction12.ixda.org/home/, [accessed 09/11/11] [13] Interaction 12. Register, http://interaction12.ixda.org/register/, [accessed 09/11/11]

[14] IxDA Lansing. (2011). Nov 17 Meeting: The Role of Sketching in Interaction Design. Available: http://ixdalansing.org/2011/11/nov-17-meeting-the-role-of-sketching-in-interactiondesign/. [accessed 9/11/11] [15] LeMoine, D. (2009). IxDA interaction 09. Available: http://www.cooper.com/journal/2009/02/ixda_interaction_09.html. [accessed 9/11/11] [16] Malouf, D. (2011). IxDA Interaction 12 | Dublin program is live and Im in it!. Available: http://davemalouf.com/?p=2074. [accessed 9/11/11] [17] Moussette, C. (2011). IxDA Interaction Awards. Available: http://www.interactiondesign.se/blog/2011/08/ixda-interaction-awards/. [accessed 9/11/11]