The City Needed It. Nobody Was Building It.

Overview

For years before UX Birmingham existed, the conversation in Birmingham's design community was the same: someone should start a UX group. UX leaders around the city talked about it. Nothing materialized. In 2019, I stopped waiting for someone else to do it and built it myself.

Over six years, UX Birmingham became the city's primary community for UX practitioners — designers, researchers, developers, and the people trying to understand what UX actually means for their organizations. We ran 50+ events, built an active community of roughly 100 members, connected with global organizations including Figma, Sketch, IxDF, and InVision as an official ambassador, and attracted participants from Australia, Europe, South America, and across the United States. We did all of it with no budget, no staff, and no institutional backing. Just a genuine need in a city that deserved something better than a LinkedIn group.

The Situation

Birmingham had a technology community. What it didn't have was a dedicated space for UX — a place where a junior designer just learning Figma and a senior UX architect with fifteen years of experience could learn from each other, connect with employers, and develop a shared vocabulary for what good design actually means.

The 501(c) tech organizations in the city were mature and well-connected. They did important work building Birmingham's broader tech scene. But UX sat in a gap — adjacent to everything, centered in nothing.

I had watched that gap for a few years. I'd heard the same conversations from other UX leaders about how someone should start something. I waited long enough to know that "someone" wasn't coming. So in September 2019, I started UX Birmingham.

The Constraint

I need to be honest about what this organization was and wasn't.

It was never formally incorporated. It never had bylaws or a board. Governance in the traditional sense — the kind with bylaws, board minutes, and fiscal sponsorship — was something I wanted to build toward but never reached. What it did have was consistent programming, real relationships, and a community of people who showed up because the content was worth showing up for.

The hardest constraint wasn't money or visibility. It was people. Specifically: finding people who wanted to actively build something, not just belong to it. Members were engaged and grateful. Getting them to take ownership of a piece of the organization — to be responsible, consistently, over time — was something I never fully solved. Whether that was a function of the culture, the nature of volunteer communities, or something about how I structured participation, I still don't have a clean answer. What I know is that I spent six years doing the work of what should have been a team of three, alongside a full-time job, and eventually that caught up with me.

How I Thought About It

The programming model I developed wasn't arbitrary. Every event had to answer one question: what does this person walk away knowing or being able to do that they didn't before?

That meant balancing three types of sessions. Skill-building sessions for practitioners who needed to learn tools and methods. Industry sessions that connected UX to the broader business and technology context in Birmingham. And community sessions that were less about content and more about connection — getting people in the room together so the relationships could form.

Speaker curation was where most of my time went. Getting speakers was easier than I expected — UX practitioners genuinely want to share what they know, and being affiliated with Figma, Sketch, IxDF, and InVision as an official ambassador gave the organization credibility that made outreach much easier. I could approach a design leader at a major company and the conversation started from a different place than a cold email from an unknown organizer.

The pandemic forced everything online in 2020 and 2021, which turned out to have an unexpected benefit: geography stopped being a constraint. We started getting one-off visitors from Australia, Europe, and South America — people who found us through our partner affiliations and joined sessions despite significant time zone differences. A UX practitioner in Melbourne doesn't wake up at 2am for a mediocre meetup. That those sessions attracted global participants told me something about the quality of what we were building.

What I never solved was the governance layer. I knew what a sustainable community organization needed: shared leadership, distributed ownership, succession planning, a structure that didn't collapse if I stepped back. I could describe it. I couldn't build it without people willing to step into defined roles and stay. The gap between what I knew needed to exist and what I was able to create was the central frustration of the organization's life.

What I Built

Over six years:

Fifty-plus events spanning skill workshops, industry panels, tool deep-dives, and community sessions. Programming that ran through a global pandemic, a job loss, and six years of doing most of the operational work alone.

Official ambassador relationships with Figma, Sketch, IxDF, and InVision — organizations that encouraged and supported UX Birmingham's work and gave it credibility within national and global design communities.

A community of roughly 100 engaged members, with a consistent core of 15–20 active participants who showed up regularly, contributed to sessions, and built relationships that have outlasted the organization's active programming.

Partnerships with established 501(c) tech organizations and chapters in Birmingham — groups with mature infrastructure and city-wide reach — that helped connect UX Birmingham to the broader technology ecosystem.

A network of relationships — between practitioners, between practitioners and employers, between Birmingham's design community and the national UX field — that still exists and still opens doors. That network didn't exist before 2019. It does now.

How It Ended

In 2024, I lost my job. The bandwidth that had always been thin became nonexistent. Without the energy to maintain the programming cadence, meetings stopped. Over about six months, without a formal close, UX Birmingham faded.

I want to name what made that hard: it wasn't the loss of the organization itself. It was knowing that the thing I hadn't solved — finding people willing to take real ownership — meant there was no one to hand it to. The community existed because I kept it going. When I couldn't keep it going, there was no infrastructure to hold it up.

I'm still looking for someone to take it over. No one has stepped up yet.

The Outcome

A UX community exists in Birmingham that didn't exist before. Practitioners who didn't know each other in 2019 have professional relationships, referral networks, and friendships that have shaped their careers. People who were early in their UX journey when they joined have grown into senior practitioners. Employers who had never thought deliberately about UX as a discipline have a better understanding of what it means and why it matters.

None of that shows up cleanly in a metric. But it's real, and it compounds in ways I'll probably never fully see.

The global reach — participants from four continents finding a Birmingham meetup through Figma and IxDF — told me that what we built had genuine quality. You don't cross a twelve-hour time zone for something mediocre.

What I'd Do Differently

I would have found my co-founders before I launched, not after. The instinct to start something and figure out the team later is a founder pattern I recognize now as a risk. A community organization run by one person is not a community organization — it's a hobby that happens to have an audience. The moment I couldn't sustain it, it stopped. That's a structural failure, not a personal one, but I built the structure.

I would have formalized governance earlier — not for its own sake, but because structure is what makes it possible for other people to step in. When everything lives in one person's head and calendar, there's nothing to hand off. I knew this. I talked about it. I didn't build it fast enough.

And I would have been more deliberate about identifying people who wanted to build, not just belong. The members who wanted to actively contribute were there — I didn't have a clear enough on-ramp for them to step into real ownership. That's a design problem as much as an organizational one. I should have designed for succession from day one.

What I don't regret is starting it. UX leaders in Birmingham had been talking about this for years before I built it. I got tired of the conversation and did something. Whatever its limitations, UX Birmingham was real, it mattered to the people who were part of it, and Birmingham's design community is different because it existed.

That's enough.