Over the weekend, UX Magazine’s Twitter account reached 50,000 followers. While that doesn’t exactly make us The New York Times, it does feel like a milestone for a scrappy little publication serving the human-centered design community.

Over the past eight years, we’ve strived to make ourselves a free and reputable resource and an open platform for user- and customer-centric designers, technologists, researchers, and strategists. Our success has only been possible thanks to our generous contributors and our loyal readership; two overlapping camps we hope will continue to grow.

We’re consistently impressed by the depth and sophistication exhibited by practitioners, but UX (for lack of a better term) still has a lot of growing to do. Our overarching goal moving into the future is to facilitate the conversations that will help the field mature.

Recently, that has included partnering with the niche user-centered recruiting team at Didus in an effort to bring some clarity to our endemic employment issues. We’re continuing to branch out in new directions, expanding our core group of individuals committed to furthering our goals of defining and informing the field of UX. What this Twitter number means to us is that there are plenty of people out there interested in being a part of these conversations and growing with us.

At the risk of pointing out the obvious, social networking will continue to be a big part of our work. With this benchmark behind us, our Facebook likes approaching 15,000, and our RSS readership nearing 33,000, we‘re in a good position to take some big steps forward together. Thank you for your continued support!

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