So You Want to Start a UX Book Club?
Over the years, people have asked us at the UX Book Club of Chicago what they should consider if they are interested in starting a UX or other kind of design book club where they live or work. Our latest request came from Uruguay! We typically answer these inquiries in one-off, private messages, but we figured it was time we capture what we’ve learned in a more open format, especially given things we’ve learned from our book club moving online since COVID-19.
This post won’t be a comprehensive how-to-start-and-run a design book club, though I would love to write that one day. It will be an outline of what we think are the major areas to consider for a design book club. These considerations may well apply to other kinds of book clubs. We also maintain a UX Book Club of Chicago organizer role description, which we make available to prospective and current organizers, and which includes details not covered below.
Meet the UX Book Club of Chicago
The UX Book Club of Chicago was established in its current form in 2012. We are a volunteer-run meetup that puts on monthly meetings to discuss books and articles in English on user experience (UX) design and related topics. Anyone interested in these topics is welcome to join our meetings. Our community has included: students, active and retired UX professionals, people who work with UX designers like software developers and product managers, career-changers, and curious passersby.
The organizing platform
Your ambition may not be to have a book club that lasts a decade, but if you have at least a vague sense that you’d like your book club to be around for more than a year, repeat this mantra: sustainability, sustainability, sustainability.
Running a book club is more work than most people anticipate, so start by thinking about what you as an organizer(s) can sustain.
The UX Book Club of Chicago has had at least two organizers at any given time for most of its existence. As a monthly meetup with organizers who have lives filled with family, work, school, and other commitments, having between three to four organizers—and keeping a mental list of book club members who might become organizers—has been most sustainable for us. We use a free instance of Slack for organizer communication.
We’ve used Meetup.com as our public organizing platform since we started. We don’t love Meetup. There are always UX hiccups, and it is expensive. However, Meetup does two things that for now are worth the price tag: it manages sign-ups for meetings, including attendance limits and people changing their RSVPs, and it helps people discover that our book club exists.
There are many alternative solutions — if we wanted to invest the effort, something as simple as an email list could suffice — but the relative ease of Meetup has been a key reason we’ve been able to keep the book club going and why our now 1900+ members have been able to follow us year after year. For many years, we have charged $2 USD for each meeting sign-up, initially to help us get a more accurate attendance count for physical meeting space and refreshments and now to help cover some of the cost of using Meetup.com. We do our best to offer support to anyone for whom joining one of our meetings poses financial hardship.
With regards to promoting the book club, we rely primarily on Meetup and word-of-mouth. We do not maintain an active social media presence, mostly due to organizer bandwidth constraints and ethical questions tied to the biggest social media platforms.
As a book club, we do not have any outside sponsorships apart from individual meeting hosts who provide space and sometimes snacks for when we had in-person meetings. For any organizing platform we use and any other book club needs, the “budget” we have to work with is my own personal wallet, and before me, the personal resources of our previous lead organizer. (Organizers do not currently divide up book club expenses, mostly for ease.) Determine what is financially sustainable for you.
When and where to meet
Over the years, we’ve learned that having a somewhat consistent and therefore predictable schedule of meetings is most beneficial for our book club. We meet once a month, on a weekday evening (in the Chicago time zone), for 90 minutes. This is what is sustainable for our organizers. We flex on which day of the month, including which weekday, to accommodate organizers and book club members.
Life can be hard to predict, so we always schedule a meeting at least one month out, but we do not schedule in advance all meetings for a year. We are trying to post meeting details at least two months out to give book club members more time to access books and do the reading.
Time to access books is particularly important while COVID-19 is still prevalent. Book club members may be experiencing changes to their households and finances, and public libraries may not be as available as they were before the pandemic.
In reality, we have found that giving people more time to read book club selections does not mean more people will complete the reading.
Before COVID-19, the UX Book Club of Chicago put on exclusively in-person events. We typically found a different UX-friendly host organization each month to let us use their physical space and, at their choosing, provide light refreshments. Often times, these office locations were in downtown Chicago (the Loop), with requirements to be close to public transportation and physically accessible to anyone unable to use stairs.
We chose not to make these meetings available to people wishing to join online because of the technical challenges of setting up our meetings in a different space each month and of facilitating intimate discussion among people in-person and online. This is another example of a decision we made to make the book club sustainable for the organizers. Changing our in-person meeting location from month to month also allowed book club members to visit different kinds of offices and potential employers.
When we held in-person meetings, we had authors join us as guest speakers on a few occasions. Usually authors approached us about coming to meetings if they happened to be in the Chicago area. We have not proactively invited authors to our meetings because we do not have the means to pay authors, and our priority is to create space for discussion rather than put on public lectures.
Since March 2020, we have been meeting online only, via Zoom. The clear upside to this change is that people who are not physically in Chicago or for whom commuting to downtown Chicago was difficult can now join us. Our last meeting included people in Canada and Mexico. There are other accessibility benefits and limitations with Zoom. (We have not offered sign language interpretation or live captioning/transcription by default for our in-person or online meetings, but we are open to trying to provide those services as needed.) And we haven’t decided yet what we will do with our meetings once it is safer to meet in-person again.
Not all of these organizing considerations will apply if you’re starting a UX book club in your workplace. You may find this research I conducted on organizational communities of practice, or workplace learning groups, helpful for thinking about how to define your workplace book club.
Selecting books and articles
We as UX Book Club of Chicago organizers choose what the group reads, with informal input from book club members and with a commitment to a diversity of authors and reading. We could do formal polling; that is more work and comes with real challenges to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). Our commitment to diversity in our reading means that for every book or article selection, we take into account not only authors’ gender, race, and ethnicity but also things like authors’ age, professional affiliations, geographic location, and cost and availability of the books. We are also critical of publishers. There are still prominent UX-focused publishers that seem to have their heads in the sand when it comes to DEI and which authors they support.
To this day, there are major UX professional groups (I’m looking at you, big UX professional association) that believe reading about UX means reading only about business requirements, wireframes, prototypes, and design systems from books written in the last decade. We read books and articles on those topics, but we also believe that almost any book that examines the way human beings live, including books that pre-date UX becoming an established professional field, can be relevant — if not vital — to people interested in UX. We also do not shy away from books on difficult topics.
A quick web search of “best UX books” makes apparent the dismal state of DEI in UX. We want to make sure we are not contributing to that state of affairs.
Using Meetup.com also allows us to share materials easily to supplement our reading selections. We have found it can be helpful in advance of a meeting to post to the event page links to external reviews of the reading selection or videos of the author talking about the book. Due to organizer bandwidth, we do this sparingly but have found sharing supplementary materials can be helpful to attendees, especially people who do not have time to finish the reading.
Facilitating book club meetings
There isn’t enough time in 2021 to document everything we’ve learned about meeting facilitation. Here are a few key considerations for new design book clubs.
First, make people feel welcome. Carve out time at the start of meetings for people to do structured, optional introductions. For example, you can ask attendees to say their first name, preferred pronouns, location, and affiliation if any. We often also give attendees the option of saying whether they are looking for a job or belong to an organization that is actively hiring for UX roles. Reiterate that all pieces of introductions are optional (as is turning on cameras for Zoom calls). We do not record our in-person or online meetings in order to help attendees feel comfortable joining the discussion, including out of respect for attendees’ privacy.
The world is changing quickly, so we also make sure to acknowledge at the start of every meeting any major world events that may be affecting attendees’ states of mind.
Aside from what news headlines tell us, we can never know the experiences and trauma with which people live.
After introductions, the organizer leading the meeting prepares and shares a brief (<5-minute) introduction and overview of the book. The organizer also brings at least a short list of open-ended discussion questions to spur conversation. We make clear to attendees that it’s okay if people have not finished the reading, or even started the reading, but we as organizers do our best to ground most of the discussion in the text. Our discussions almost always (okay, always) veer into tangents that can be enjoyable and memorable for everyone, but we have found that having the organizer do their best to bring the discussion back to the book helps the most people have meaningful experiences with our book club. I have also observed the same to be true for design- and product-themed workplace book clubs.
Our meeting attendance has ranged from three people to over 40 people. In our experience, the ideal group size for meaningful conversation is no more than 15 people, so we’ve used breakout groups as needed. As with any facilitation, the organizer plays a critical role in making sure the discussion is inclusive of attendees.
We draw passionate people. It is not uncommon for the organizer to need to amplify non-dominant voices and non-majority perspectives.
Overall, we have found as organizers that modeling the kinds of communication we would like attendees to use is effective, including demonstrating open-ended questions, active listening, anti-racist language, and humility when being unsure about language or concepts.
Finally with facilitation, don’t forget to leave enough time toward the end of meetings to conclude. We’ve found that starting to wrap things up 15 minutes before the meeting end time is sufficient. During the wrap-up, you can ask attendees for any final thoughts on the reading, summarize key discussion points, thank everyone for their participation, and announce the next month’s reading and meeting date. Ending meetings on time is a way to respect attendees’ other commitments.
After meetings
A few years ago, we started a blog on Medium.com to document our book club meetings. Maintaining a blog is hard (it is really hard). Medium comes with its own limitations, and we’re still learning how to do manage the blog in ways sustainable for us.
We have found it valuable to be able to link to overviews of past meetings. We’ve shared these links with authors in gratitude, people considering joining the book club, people who had to miss book club meetings, and for our own personal reference, to remember specific books. If you’re organizing a workplace book club, documentation of past meetings, whether made public or kept private to your organization, may be a tool for securing funding and/or other support for your book club from management.
When we had in-person meetings for the UX Book Club of Chicago, the most important task following a meeting was to convey our gratitude to our meeting host.
Because we are a lean group, we can make changes to how we operate fairly easily. We reflect informally after each meeting and make changes as needed. We have also found it valuable to reflect together, synchonrously, as an organizer group at the end of each year. Every December, the organizers make a point of meeting in-person or online to celebrate and debrief the year and set intentions for the book club in the following year. The end-of-year meeting is also when we try to onboard any new organizers. For non-organizers, we try to publish yearly re-caps, like this one of 2020 and this one of 2019.
To conclude
Running the UX Book Club of Chicago is a labor of love. There are months when life is such that book club preparation is not fun. (Meeting book club members and our discussions are always fun.) Yet we’re proud of the community we’ve built.
We’ve created a space where year after year people have found friendships, professional contacts, jobs, educational opportunities, and ideas that have influenced the way they live and work. In our own small ways, we’re trying to support authors and publishers and make the UX field more inclusive.
Much of the advice we’ve documented here has been learned through humbling trial, and for as long as we exist, we will evolve to serve our community. The best way to learn about our book club is to come to one of our meetings.
