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There is no doubt that the UX community in the UK (and in particular London, Brighton and the South East) is growing in strength, confidence and cohesion. Groups and events – such as London IA, UXLondon and UXCampLondon – are burgeoning: selling out events, full of active members planning and discussing a wide range of subjects.

More and more people are moving into UX design, interaction design, information architecture, experience architecture (or whatever you would like to call it) and there is a growing sense of collaboration, sharing of knowledge and experience and resources. UX people are getting to know each other – a real community is being born – and it doesn’t just exist online, people are searching each other out and really getting to know each other.

UX people are sharing work and jobs through many channels including of course Twitter, but as more and more ‘junior’ and less experienced (and some non-experienced) people join the community is the community providing enough tools for them to get started, get experience, get work?

There is no doubt that it serves us all if the UX community goes from strength to strength but if we don’t help the more junior and less experienced/inexperienced members with work and learning opportunities a large divide between the experienced and the inexperienced is likely to open up and this isn’t going to help anyone. A unified UX community with a good balance of experience will ensure credibility. It will educate. It will create. It will strengthen and it will definitely improve the online experience.

Of course there are existing initiatives such as the mentor programme at the IA Institute and various intern programmes but I believe we need to do more – more direct action that assists every new member of the community. Obviously I’m referring to serious candidates not fly-by-night ‘vague interests’.

We as a community – a growing, collaborative, social community renowned for grace, humility and sharing – need to do more.

I propose that an assistance charter is framed where all senior, experienced members of the UX community are encouraged to directly assist junior and/or inexperienced members of the community to get work and grow their experience and portfolios.

In this vein there are plans afoot to try and develop and support a selection of UX-related conference speakers to build up the UK presence on the international conference circuit. This won’t happen overnight but if it isn’t addressed it may not happen naturally. A peer-to-peer marketplace for UX recruitment in and around London, UK. Idea to complement existing UX recruitment agencies, providing a service for individuals and small companies to access UX professionals directly.

Idea also to enhance offering by providing a UX-style ‘Mechanical Turk’ service to enable and encourage more junior and less experienced members of the UX community to gain work from the more experienced members of the UX community.

The community are active members of London IA, UPA

Mechanical UX

At some point we all need help with projects and a helping hand. Mechanical UX takes the basic principle of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and applies it to the both the requirements of the inexperienced and experienced members of the UX community.

It is evident that the UX community is expanding at a healthy rate but that there is also a paucity of opportunities for the more inexperienced members, as well as people seeking to move across from other roles such as product management or research, as they look to build up experience and their portfolios.

There is an opportunity to satisfy this requirement and ‘bridge a gap’ through the more experienced and increasingly busy and sought after members of the community identifying flexible mentorships and guiding hands and the passing down of structured pieces of work such as research, wireframing, storyboarding, administration support, user testing organisation etc to the more inexperienced and or new members of the community.

UX Job Search using Work With

Coming early in the new year is a new peer-to-peer job search site called Work With that will pioneer searching for jobs across UX, design, front end, and more. It will be supported by You the User, UX Exchange, London Web Standards, Joe Lanman at Formd, and Jeff Van Campen at Otrops.

There will be the opportunity to become a member and below is a guide to inclusion (and only a guide as of course all are welcome):

All participating members supported by a recognised and reputable network of other individuals. Idea that network goes beyond just supplying work to members but offers an infrastructure to learn, discover and exchange experience, knowledge and ideas:

(For established employers such as creative agencies or client-side organisations there is no cost to advertise a job.)

If you would like to become a member of UXWork at Work With or just find out more please contact Matthew Solle on:

email at youtheuser dot com

Follow @uxwork for updates

Existing Members

Robert M. Fein
Jeff Gothelf
Dave Graceson
Fabian Marry
Rob Enslin
Jonathan Melhuish
Diarmad McNally
Matthew Solle
Jan Srutek
Jason Mesut
Dr Katerina Tzanidou
Desigan Chinniah
Danny Hope
Rhys Howell
Jason Bootle
Jason West
Mark Plant
Nicky Conti
Jane Austin
Chris Marsh
David Fisher
Ben Gilmore
Gavin Wye
Rebecca Cottrell
Mike Laurie
Alison Austin
Ian Fenn
Pete Smith
Veronica Hill
Anne Stevens
Boon Yew Chew
Adrian Hallek-Jones