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Following Step 1, Step 2 of getting a blog is defining the scope. Now we are gathering volunteers at a third question.

Define the scope and purpose of the blog. Is the blog about the site? Is it about the site’s topic? Is it about the industry around the topic? Keep in mind the audience of your community and their interests. Another generic blog about may not be all that interesting. A community blog should be interesting to both current members and potential new members.

We need to pick our topics and what specific sorts of posts we will have. Keep one idea (Question of the Week, UX reviews, UX studies ect) per answer and flesh out the specifics as much as possible. Feel free to post multiple ideas and comment on what works and what doesn't work.

I'm making this Community Wiki so we can all specify and define the specific ideas we want to make work.

Vote up ideas you would be interested in reading or writing. Vote down ideas you think are not appropriate/wanted for the blog. Comment or edit to improve existing ideas if you think they can be better.

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Case Studies

Original evaluations and/or walkthroughs of designs or redesigns. Example: LinkedIn iPad App Engineering

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Original UX Research

Suggested before, we've got a few people interested in making it happen. We could take some of our good questions which are lacking good UX research (A/B studies or other simple tests to more complex studies) and create & publish our original research into the matter.

We can publish all the numbers and explain our methodology so the research remains reproducible and available for statistical analysis.

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  • I'd definitely like to see more research other than A/B studies. I have some ideas and will be happy to contribute to the Trello Board or post here.
    – Michael Lai Mod
    Commented Jul 29, 2013 at 23:55
  • @MichaelLai the blog effort has sort of floundered for now. We'd need to drum up support again if we wanted to kick it off, though there is a trello board. Might be best to try and gather some people in chat (or other UX people you know who'd be willing to write) before we try and get this off the ground again
    – Zelda Mod
    Commented Jul 30, 2013 at 14:41
  • @MichaelLai though I've already gone and added you to the trello board
    – Zelda Mod
    Commented Jul 30, 2013 at 15:15
  • Rock - thanks for adding me to the board, I'll try to get some ideas together before looking at your suggestions
    – Michael Lai Mod
    Commented Jul 30, 2013 at 22:24
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Question of the Week

Question of the Week is an idea from Security's blog where they pick an interesting question from the past week and dive deeper into the issue.

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    I think the DIY blog had a good example of this in their blog post a few weeks ago. It might not have been a question taken from the site but it was sparked by a different question. They knocked it out of the park. diy.blogoverflow.com/2012/04/clutches-torque-and-you
    – Andrew Shipe
    Commented May 15, 2012 at 2:59
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Book Reviews

Posts about relevant books including reviews, previews, suggested readings, etc.

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Commentary

Thoughts, opinions, and ramblings on recent UX literature/media (ideally both constructive and critical).

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External Resources

Posts about the UX community, events and people, including online information that has just been published (or good archives for people to look at), upcoming events, and informative print publications.

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New patterns

Collating examples of new patterns and solutions to age-old problems, including insights from non-traditional sources such as print design, cartography, retail and videogames. Analyses of new solutions and open discussion on the innovations upcoming interface technologies might bring.

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Second Chance

There are a lot of questions that may be interesting, and related to UX, but they were rejected because they were shopping questions, too broad, or too opinionated. I think mining those questions for topics to cover would be a good idea; they're often interesting questions, even if they don't fit the Q&A format. By taking them to the blog, and answering them there (perhaps as a cooperative thing: multiple people offer differing opinions) it would answer the question without cluttering up the main UX site.

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Real World Examples

Real world examples of what happens when users don’t understand what to do. This could be from usability test experience, workshops and things you find at work.

Another angle would be how you present UX as an aspect of any artifact and how you sell it. How do we convince customers, colleagues, suppliers and management that what we do is important?

Examples

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Introduction to User Experience

Posts regarding canonical questions such as "What is User Experience?"

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    SE is targeted at experts, and so is UX.se, so discussing beginner topics isn't really a good fit for the site.
    – user4662
    Commented May 11, 2012 at 20:00
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    @Christofian I respectfully disagree. I'd say emphatically that it's also for beginners seeking help on SE.
    – GotDibbs
    Commented May 11, 2012 at 20:04
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Expert bash

Controversial debate between two of the blog's contributors.

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Tools and Techniques

A blog would be a perfectly suited platform for discussing tools and techniques that emerge as industry standards. Over time these can change and blog posts writing critically about the evolution of tools and techniques would be topically of interest to our target audience. Posts on these subjects would compliment the main UX.SE site which currently is not "suitable" for them.

One of the main selling points of the blog should be that you can get something of value that you don't already get from the main site. Tools and techniques fits into that slot quite nicely.

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Jobs

Open positions in the field of UX is a very practical topic. For obvious reasons it would fit the demographics of the readers perfectly, and it attracts readers that we want participating in the site.

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    I think jobs would detract from the focus we want to present here - there are plenty of other resources that (try to) do the job much better and taking into account search criteria, location, salary, etc etc. We should stick to what we know and do it well, or not at all.
    – Roger Attrill
    Commented May 14, 2012 at 10:46

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