Why Become an Author at Usability Geek?
- Your article will be promoted to a massive audience of over 100,000 design professionals every single month.
- You will get a considerable boost to your professional reputation and career.
- Your article will be promoted across all our social media channels.
- If you do exceptionally well, we’re able to promote your article on the social media channels of the Interaction Design Foundation – reaching over 700,000 followers, and 600,000 monthly visitors
- You will be part of an exclusive elite of design authors.
- You get full author recognition: Your name, biography and photo appear underneath your article
- A constructive, iterative and thorough editorial process: You will have professional editors to help you in a constructive and non-controlling way.
- Your publication will help bring about the democratization of knowledge. Being completely free and unrestricted in its online version, we are firm believers in the philosophy that knowledge should be free and accessible to all.
About Usability Geek
Usability Geek is a Usability & User Experience (UX) publication that provides practical and useful insights from the fields of Usability, User Experience, Human Computer Interaction (HCI), Web Design, Information Architecture (IA) and related areas.
Our readers share the love of creating a great user experience – irrespective of what product or service they are creating.
Article Requirements
So what articles get published on Usability Geek? We can answer this with one simple phrase – “any article that creates a great user experience!“.
People visit Usability Geek to stay updated about the latest trends and techniques and also to learn more about well-established methodologies.
Any article that is submitted must be:
- Detailed: 1,200 words or more.
- Actionable and Relevant: This is a niche publication and we only accept articles about Usability, User Experience, Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), Web Design, Information Architecture (IA) and related fields. If you are not sure whether the topic of your article is suitable, we suggest visiting the start here page to fully understand what Usability Geek is all about. Another important requirement is that your article must provide practical advice. This means that while we do accept (and encourage) authors to challenge accepted principles, this must be done in a constructive manner using well-researched and balanced arguments.
- Gravatar-enabled: Your e-mail address must be Gravatar-enabled so that your photograph appears in the author bio. If your e-mail is not already registered, please head over to Gravatar to register it. Also, please send us a short author bio so that it appears next to your photo.
- Not promotional: The objective of submitting an article on Usability Geek is for the reader to learn something. In this regard, your article must not be a sales pitch where you promote a particular company, product or service. Nor may it contain affiliate links.
- Linked to external sites: Each article must have around 3 outgoing links to reference work that has already been conducted by someone else. There is no maximum limit on the number of times you link to articles on UsabilityGeek.com itself. Appropriate citations give due credit to other authors, avoid repetition of content that is already published elsewhere and serve as a benefit for readers who want to read more about something that is being mentioned without distracting others who do not. That being said, we are very strict with regards to the quality of such outgoing links and the anchor text that is used to link to them. Please note, that the editorial team, at its discretion, can add and remove links and references to make sure our readers can benefit through further resources.
- Original: We do not publish copied or re-hashed content. Your article needs to pass our plagiarism-checking mechanisms, which consist of a combination of automated tools and manual checking.
- Conforming to Google’s link guidelines: Simply put, any article that violates Google’s guidelines for links, will not be published.
- Accompanied by images: Each submission needs to contain 1 accompanying image which will be used as the lead image. The dimension for this image must be at least 1000px wide. While the submission of additional images is not mandatory, we strongly encourage it since they add more clarity and appeal to articles. You can find great, royalty-free and non-copyrighted images on Unsplash.com and Pixabay.com and Pexels.com – just to name a few. When you send us additional images, please send us large versions. We will crop and re-size images ourselves. Please ensure that you know the copyright status of these images and are allowed to use them (just use the websites mentioned above and you’ll be fine).
- Proof-read and polished: Please make sure to proofread your article before submitting it – as well as polish all sentences so your article is engaging to read. Try to impress us with your attention to detail and by getting the “sum of all details” just right. If you impress us, you will impress your readers.
Send us your proposal
We assume that since you have reached this part, it excites you to join the Usability Geek family as an author. Let us assure you that the feeling is mutual, and we look forward to welcome you aboard!
Please click the button to get started. Only submissions made from this form will be considered.