Characterizing Growth and Decline in Online UX Communities
Gillian Chen, Lillio Mok · 2021
UX practitioners increasingly rely on online communities to collaborate on and discuss complex design problems. Understanding how these platforms flourish is thus of interest to both HCI academia and the broader UX discipline. In this study, we comparatively investigate the longevity of two such groups: the r/userexperience community on Reddit and the UX subforum on Stack Exchange. By quantifying how users post online on aggregate and what users discuss in their individual posts, we find that Reddit has grown consistently as a digital forum for UX practice. In contrast, Stack Exchange has contracted despite being more responsive and being as capable of addressing mainstream UX concepts as Reddit. Discussions of niche, higher-level UX concepts on Stack Exchange also declined disproportionately, leading to less conceptual diversity. Our results therefore contribute an initial comparative understanding of community longevity between online UX platforms.