Are most UX.SE users originally StackOverflow users?

Question

I found my way here after using StackOverflow for a couple of years. There is now a wide range of StackExchange sites, from UX to Cooking.

It seems like most users around the network has a love for facts, scrutinization, proving skills and sharing knowledge. I would call us nerds. I mean that as a good thing. Whether you like to nerd it up with UX, cooking, parenting or photography, is revealed in your SE network accounts.

You see where I am going. It hit me that all the users actually could be computer nerds. It all started with StackOverflow. I do not know anyone who knows about any SE site, that is not a programmer. There are already a bunch of cooking sites around the web. There are other English sites and there are other UX sites. Their users are not like the users of {Cooking, English, UX}.StackExchange.com.

The question: Is the user base of UX.StackExchange basically programmers who found their way here from StackOverflow, just like me? Is there any SO-UX correlated account or reputation comparison statistics?

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Related question: Overlap UX/SO users

Answer 1

Stack Overflow is how most Stack Exchange users seem to find any of the other sites at this point, so yeah I'd say it's safe to assume a good amount of UX.SE people are from or have used SO/SU/SF.

The thing is Stack Overflow was hugely popular and for the most part all the sites were born of users of SO. Stack Exchange is trying to grow to not just be a network of programmers that have other interests, but building up that sort of general brand is hard.

I wouldn't say we're all programmers rather than UX designers though; many designers that work with CSS or HTML end up on Stack Overflow even if they're not programmers by job title.

Actually, I found some extremely strong evidence from our Area51 commitment phase:

committers active in
83.0% Stack Overflow
80.4% User Experience

So, out of people who * committed* to the site, slightly more participated in SO than participated here...so that's our base audience. We've grown a LOT since then but a fair number of our active users came form SO.

Answer 2

I can only speak for myself, but I was not a StackOverflow user prior to getting involved on UX.SE (though I was quite familiar with it). My participation on UX.SE has actually led me to get somewhat involved on SO and other SE sites, actually.

Answer 3

I think some UX professionals, like me, may have first heard of UX.SE through the Balsamiq website. If Peldi and co. at Balsamiq recommend anything strongly, I pay attention. As usual, they weren't wrong :)

Answer 4

I followed in through Coding Horror, but never quite kept up with SO enough to get very far over there. I can't even remember what my username over there is.