Alain Robillard-Bastien our Director of Volunteers sits down with Joshua Rosenberg to discuss his volunteering with UXPA International.
What are your activities as a volunteer at UXPA? Since when?
I’ve been the volunteer production manager at the Journal of Usability Studies since 2015. I work with the editorial team to manage uxpajournal.org, and am primarily responsible for making sure every journal issue gets published to the website four times per year.
What motivated you to become a volunteer with us initially?
I was in graduate school working with Bill Albert who, along with Jim Lewis, is editor-in-chief of the journal. At that time, I was eager to soak up as much information as possible about the field of UX and to have the opportunity to network with seasoned professionals.
What challenges have you encountered in your role as a volunteer?
As with any volunteer role, it can be a challenge to prioritize the work and view it as a real commitment on top of your paid job and the rest of your life. The idea of volunteering always sounds great, but when you get to that weekend where the sun is shining outside but you need to spend 6-8 hours working in WordPress, you get to see how committed you really are!
What motivates you to invest yourself in this role?
I think the journal serves a really important role in the community. UX is such a thriving field and there’s a lot of info out there, but I’m not sure there are many other sources publishing peer-reviewed articles aimed at practitioners. It’s easy to type a question about survey design into Google, for example, and get a million subjective opinions (which, by the way, I do often), but some topics deserve a high level of rigour and it’s great that the journal can provide that.
What is the most rewarding, the most enjoyable aspect of being a volunteer?
I find it really rewarding to play a small role in broadcasting voices from the international UX community. We’ve been fortunate to have authors from all over the world submit articles to the journal, and it’s amazing to see the types of problems that people are tackling with technology and user experience globally. Also, as a UX researcher myself, I love nerding out over the UX methods that people are exploring in their papers.
What would you say to someone who would like to become a volunteer?
Do it! I feel like I’m often so hyper-focused on my day-to-day working as a researcher at DonorsChoose. Volunteering with UXPA is a great way to step outside of that feel connected to all the amazing work going on in the field.
If you would like to get involved with UXPA International, find out more on our volunteering page.
About the Author(s)
I have been working in UX for 15+ years and love what I do ???? yay!