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 Community: The Interaction Design Association (IxDA) Name: William Kennedy Student No: 0726885 Module Title: Multimedia Industry Perspectives Module Code: CS4047 Description The IxDA is a professional organisation consisting of interaction designers, user experience professionals, informatio n 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 I nteraction 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 supp ort other “opportuni ties 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 t heir professiona l status (as a student, consultant, employed recruiter, etc) [Fig. 1]. Indeed, the IxDA itself self- describes as an “un- organization” [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

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Community: The Interaction Design Association (IxDA)Name: William Kennedy

Student No: 0726885

Module Title: Multimedia Industry Perspectives

Module Code: CS4047

DescriptionThe 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 it‟s 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 “un-

organization” [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

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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 BoardThe 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 andselect 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 akeyword will find job posts which contain that speciality.

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Figure 3

DiscussionOne 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 arealso links on this page to the discussion archives [8] and help section [9] which provides an

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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 doesn‟t have an active enough community to justify such afeature.

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Figure 5

Figure 6

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Figure 7

Figure 8

ResourcesThe 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 resourcecontent in this section, as opposed to the Discussion forum which is more open and easier to

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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 contentis 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 DirectoryThe 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 usersto 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.

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Figure 10

ConferenceThe 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 involvementin 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. 

LocalThe „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 it‟s

location, number of members, number of posts and group coordinator. The main Local page

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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, it‟s 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 e-

mail, 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 theIxDA 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

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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 LifeA 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

designer‟s 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, andmeeting 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 theidea 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.

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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-open-

book-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/archive-

summary, [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-interaction-design/. [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 I’m 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]