What Do User Experience Professionals Discuss Online? Topic Modeling of a User Experience Q&A Community

Questioning and answering (Q&A) communities have been widely used by user experience (UX) professionals to exchange knowledge online. As online content has been increasingly generated by professional users in the community, it becomes infeasible for human experts to manually analyze those discussions. Thus, automatic and intelligent analysis of the online content generated by UX professionals is needed to understand how UX knowledge is created and maintained by professionals in online communities. This research offers a comprehensive understanding of user-generated content in a UX Q&A community through topic modeling, an intelligent text-mining approach for discovering hidden topics from textual documents. Specifically, this research identifies 40 important latent discussion topics from a dataset containing 31,314 questions and 80,579 answers posted by UX professionals. Those topics are classified into 8 major categories, followed by popularity and content cohesion analysis of those categories and their mapping to a well-established design thinking process model. Overall, this research contributes a systematic exploration of user-generated content by UX professionals in a Q&A community and highlights opportunities for UX researchers and practitioners.