Introduction to Volume 21, Issue 2

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Our February 2026 essay is “The UX Profession: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow,” by Rebecca Baker. In the essay, Dr. Baker discusses current issues in the UX profession, how we got here, and what may lie ahead.

This issue also includes two research papers.

The first paper is “A Scale to Assess Consumer Perceptions of Technology Product Inclusivity: Development and Validation,” by Carmen Van Ommen, Barbara S. Chaparro, Joseph R. Keebler, Sanjay Batra, and Mei Lu. The authors describe the development and validation of a new standardized UX questionnaire that assesses the extent to which users perceive a product to be inclusive (for example, designed for use by older adults or people with disabilities).

The second paper is “The Future of Digital Society: Beauty, Meaning, and Motivation Among Digital Natives,” by André Delwyn Gopal. He conducted mixed methods research on how variation in aesthetics and beauty affects digital experiences, finding strong positive effects.   

Published in: in Volume 21, Issue 2,

The Authors

  • Photo of Bill AbertBill Albert, PhD

    Dr. Albert is Founder and Principal of Greenlight Idea Lab, the only global agency exclusively focused on concept and product validation. Prior to Greenlight Idea Lab, Bill was Senior Vice President and Global Head of Customer Experience at Mach49, a growth incubator for global businesses, and Executive Director of the User Experience Center and Adjunct Professor in Human Factors in Information Design at Bentley University. He has more than 20 peer-reviewed publications and has presented his work in user experience at more than 50 national and international conferences. He co-wrote (with Tom Tullis) the first book on UX metrics, Measuring the User Experience: Collecting, Analyzing, and Presenting UX Metrics (third edition published in 2022), spawning the quantitative movement in UX. He received his PhD from Boston University. He completed a post-doc at Nissan Cambridge Basic Research with a focus on cognitive demands in the use of navigation systems.

  • James R. (Jim) Lewis, Ph.D

    Dr. Lewis is a Distinguished User Experience Researcher at MeasuringU. He has published influential papers on the assessment of perceived usability and sample size estimation for usability studies and has product experience in the design and evaluation of user interfaces (graphical, spoken, mobile), including having been the lead interaction designer for the product widely regarded as the first smart phone, the Simon. He is on over 90 US patents and has over 100 publications. His five books include Practical Speech User Interface Design and, with Jeff Sauro, Quantifying the User Experience and Surveying the User Experience. In 2021, he was inducted into the Academy of Medicine, Engineering, and Science of Florida.