UX Book Club Boston

I’m relatively new to UX design. I’ve noticed that like many methods and practices in web design, UX was one of those things that I was doing before I knew I was doing it. I’m at the point that I am called a User Experience Designer by my peers, on top of all the other names I’m called.

Enter the UX Book Club

A few months ago, the UX Book Club popped up on my web radar. It’s essentially a decentralized club, located anywhere there are UX fans to volunteer to start one. Naturally I thought it was a great idea, so I started a Boston page and alerted the locals.

Setting up the proper channels

I left the idea on hold for a few months, until I realized it wasn’t going to happen unless I put it together. So I set up the requisite event and group pages, created a twitter account, and bought a domain name, UX Boston.com. (It takes a domain name and a new web site to create the pressure required to motivate me to organize a social event.)

First time’s a charm

Our first meet up was Thursday, March 26th, and it was awesome. I’ll do my best to summarize what happened.

6 great people (well, 5 great people, and me) met up for drinks and food at the Cambridge Brewing Company. After some introductions I busted out the 4 books I brought with me. We passed them around and discovered most of them were new to us. I didn’t plan to dive in to any one of the books, but wanted to get a feel for what everyone else expected. That seemed to work fine for everyone else.

Here are few things we said we wanted to get out of the club.

• Learn about UX design.
• Discuss UX with like-minded people.
• Find out what are other people reading.

How do I become a UX designer?

This is a question we’re aiming to answer. We discovered there’s a curious process to becoming a UX designer. It is, like I said, a position that can sneak up on you. You start with a simple vision: make the experience of the people using your product as easy and delightful as possible. And if you stick with it, one day, you know more about UX than you thought you could. I’ll percolate on this notion for a while. There is more to it than magic dust.

Where are all the UX mentors?

We noticed there’s too much isolation in small and large companies. All 6 of us noted that if you’re interested in UX design, it’s hard to come by a mentor or a like-minded colleague that you can bounce these ideas off of. A mentor is such a valuable thing. If you don’t have one, find one. (I’m willing to be a mentor to whoever asks. I’m friendly. Just say hi, and I’ll take you out for a coffee or a beer.)

But that’s also where the UX Book Club comes in to the picture, we’re a group of like-minded individuals. All willing to learn how to become better UX designers, even if that’s not our formal training or practice.

Safety in numbers

I enjoyed the small crowd. It was small enough that we all got a chance to talk about UX design and other things directly related to our circumstances. I’m interested to see how we adapt to a larger venue with more people.

The format this time was more free-form and social than structured and book-related. Which is fine, and we’ve got a better plan for next time. First of all, we’ll all read the same book before we come. I’ll be prepared to summarize in case someone comes that hasn’t read it. I’ll have an outline of the book, with points to discuss from each chapter. I’m really excited for meeting #2!

Next meeting – next month

Our next meet up is next month, though we haven’t set a date yet. The next book we will read will be Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug. It’s a great starter to the UX way of thinking. Some of us have already read it, which means it’ll be easier to talk about after refreshing out memories. It’s an easy read, everyone should read it, whether you’re an aspiring UX designer or someone to makes things for the web. You can learn a lot from Mr. Krug.

Most importantly, thank you!

Thank you all for coming! I greatly appreciated it, and I’m truly grateful that 5 of you, not knowing what to expect, came out on Thursday. I hope to see you again at the next one. If you didn’t make it out, we’d love to see you next month.