Communities of practice offer opportunities for shared learning, advocacy, and advancing common goals. We reflect on our attempts to grow UX communities of practice and describe a strategy that can be useful to other niche scientific groups.

This is the fifth article in a series about User Experience (UX) in the scientific software lifecycle (first, second, third, fourth) from members of the UX team in the Scientific Data Division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. This piece focuses on the value of communities of practice and the burgeoning efforts to grow one around UX for scientific or research software. We share opportunities to get involved and a principle we have leveraged to ensure a low barrier to entry: actionable transparency (Baldwin & von Hippel, 2011; Colfer & Baldwin, 2016). Actionable transparency ensures that anyone interested in contributing can easily understand how to engage and take their first steps toward participation.

How have we not met?

It is always a delight when we meet someone new who works on UX or human-computer interaction problems in the scientific software space. It’s exhilarating to find others who share the goal of creating more usable tools that help research get done faster, more reliably, and with less frustration. But it’s also disorienting. How, in what feels like such a niche space, have we not met before?

The answer often lies in the lack of open, easily discoverable venues for our community of practice to gather. Without these spaces—for the scientific UX community or any other—it can be easy to underestimate interest or to think you know the full landscape of community members. Additionally, without colleagues to bounce ideas off of, it can be difficult to know how to best communicate your skills and value to new people. Communities of practice are essential for shared learning, advocacy, and advancing common goals. They also provide emotional support, skills-building opportunities, and camaraderie. These benefits make the challenges of progressing science more rewarding for the individuals involved.

For the scientific UX community, several working groups have been established to fill this role. As the current and former co-chairs of two, the US-RSE UX working group and the user/developer experience (UDX) working group in the Consortium for the Advancement of Scientific Software (CASS), we now have places to invite new individuals who are curious about user experience for scientific software.

Making the most of working groups

Regularly engaging a community that is dispersed over a continent, or globally, and that shares next to no open calendar slots, is a difficult task. Time constraints and diverse topical interests may necessitate multiple community meetings and interest groups when managed effectively.

The US-RSE UX and CASS UDX working groups, for example, complement one another rather than compete. The US-RSE UX working group currently meets monthly on the third Thursday from 4:00-5:00 pm Eastern. Meetings are designed to be open and inclusive by incorporating opportunities to give or receive feedback on UX work, to grow or practice UX skills, and work on resources meant to promote user experience in science. Meanwhile, the CASS UDX group, a newer engagement opportunity, meets on the first Tuesday of odd months from 12:00-1:00 pm Eastern. This meeting resembles a seminar and features speakers on related topics to user-developer experiences who share their research findings and lessons learned from their work.

For these groups to succeed, they must be easily discoverable and welcoming. We hope that as time goes on, when we or our collaborators meet a new person in the scientific UX community, our invitations to these working groups are increasingly met with a happy response we have enjoyed: “I’ve heard of that group and have been meaning to make it to a meeting.” Regardless, evangelizing user experience approaches and fostering a community of practice takes dedicated work. We find that a key to this is being openly transparent and carving out clear opportunities for collaboration.

Fostering open collaboration and communities of practice

Actionable transparency is a key principle we have found important alongside evangelism when growing working groups and communities of practice. This principle, common in research on open collaborations like open source software communities (see below), will resonate with UX practitioners as it applies a human-centered perspective to collaborative work. With actionable transparency, contributors are easily able to see opportunities for engaging with a community. The way a community works should be readily discernible (transparent) and simple to become a part of (actionable).

In practice, this means that someone considering participation in a working group must be able to see exactly what that would entail. We work toward this goal constantly, but some strategies we have adopted include:

• Maintaining a list of ways to get involved with the working group, from adding links to a list of UX resources to assisting with live tutorials
  
• Posting updates and calls for participation in Slack channels, not just during live meetings
  
• Sharing running meeting notes so people unable to attend can keep abreast of the conversation, and sharing recordings of meetings privately when attendees are comfortable (always ask!)
  
• Enabling members to suggest speakers or topics via a form or open call in communication spaces
  
• Providing written and video-based instruction on how to contribute to a collaborative white paper in a modular way

As virtual communities that communicate primarily through Slack, the CASS and US-RSE working groups leverage Slack canvases to post this information and link to other documents. Thus, in the same space where conversation happens, people can find other ways to participate, including suggesting things they would be interested in leading.

Join us

Gaining visibility and persuading members to find time to contribute to ongoing efforts remain challenges for the US-RSE UX and CASS UDX working groups. Individuals have many competing demands on their work time, particularly in periods of budget uncertainty. These groups have strong attendance—the first CASS UDX meeting in May 2025 was attended by 15 people, and the US-RSE UX group averages a similar number—but we hope to grow their numbers and the engagement they inspire.

If you want to get to know peers in the scientific UX community, to share your work, or simply learn more about user experience in scientific software development, please join us in one or both of these working groups. Your questions, contributions, and mere presence advance our goals of demystifying and advocating for UX work for research software. Together, we can all create and steward more usable, reliable, and joyful software experiences for science.

To join US-RSE and the UX working group, fill out this form for an invitation to the Slack space, then join the #wg-ux channel. The Consortium for the Advancement of Scientific Software (CASS) User-Developer Experience (UDX) working group holds monthly meetings, alternating between organized presentations and open discussions, open to all. To join, register for the open discussion sessions (even months) or the webinar sessions (odd months), according to your interests. Have thoughts on these or other strategies for growing communities of practice? Reach out!

Further information

• This article is part of a series about UX for scientific software. The other articles are linked below as they are published.
  • Framing User Experience (UX) Across the Scientific Software Lifecycle
  • User Experience Design (UXD) in the Lifecycle of Scientific Software
  • User Experience Engineering in the Lifecycle of Scientific Software
  • Design Systems To Help Amplify Development of Usable Scientific Software Interfaces
  • Growing Communities of Practice in Scientific Software: Experiences from User Experience (this article)
• Interested in joining communities of practice for UX in science?
  • The US-RSE community and its User Experience working group offer the opportunity to engage with others about UX or identify resources to help your own software team. https://us-rse.org/wg/ux/ Complete this form for an invitation to their Slack space.
  • The Consortium for the Advancement of Scientific Software (CASS) User-Developer Experience (UDX) working group holds monthly meetings, alternating between organized presentations and open discussions, open to all. To join, register for the open discussion sessions (even months) or the webinar sessions (odd months), according to your interests.
• Curious about actionable transparency?
  • Baldwin, C., & von Hippel, E. (2011). Modeling a Paradigm Shift: From Producer Innovation to User and Open Collaborative Innovation. Organization Science, 22(6), 1399–1417. DOI: 10.1287/orsc.1100.0618.
  • Colfer, L. J., & Baldwin, C. Y. (2016). The mirroring hypothesis: Theory, evidence, and exceptions. Industrial and Corporate Change, 25(5), 709–738. DOI: 10.1093/icc/dtw027.

Author bios

Johanna Cohoon and Drew Paine are User Experience Researchers in the Scientific Data Division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. They are co-chairs of the US-RSE User Experience and CASS User-Developer Experience working groups.

Johanna (Hannah) Cohoon applies her background in cognitive science and studying open collaboration in science to improve researchers’ experiences developing and using scientific software. Johanna earned her PhD in Information Science from the University of Texas at Austin.

Drew Paine contributes to a range of UX projects (https://ux.lbl.gov), including STRUDEL and the DOE High Performance Data Facility (HPDF). Drew has over a decade of qualitative user research experience in scientific software and commercial cloud environments. He holds a PhD in Human Centered Design & Engineering from the University of Washington and a BS in Software Engineering from Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology.