I was searching for profiles for my team, and got a chance to play around with the LinkedIn search. I started searching for ‘People’ with a few relevant UX terms which professionals use in their profiles.

I Found the number that is shown on the top left corner (Indicating total number of people displayed for this search. Then I repeatedly added 2 filters for location, United States, and India, and found these numbers very interesting.

My company (INformatica) primarily has large R&D teams in US, and India (and of course in other select locations) but kept the search to only 3 following filters.. for people having the TERM in their profile.

• No Filter added = Worldwide,
• Location filter ‘United States’ added = People in US
• Location filter ‘India added = People in India

The results were very interesting.

The numbers looked like this:

Few observations:

• People worldwide filtered on term ‘Visual Design’ were 3.0 Mil. ‘User Experience’ were 2.8 Mil, and Term ‘Design’ were just 2.4 Mil. That came in as a surprise to me.
• The term ‘User Experience’ wins over ‘Usability’ in a clear 5 times, Understandable, most professionals, like calling themselves User experience, over Usability now. If I would have run the same study 8-10 years back, Probably ‘Usability would have won.
• ‘User research’ term returns 1.6 Mil people, whereas, ‘User Researcher’ returns only 11K I think its easier to say I also know User research, but User researcher being my title looks rare. The number drastically reduces in India to 239. Yes India surely needs many more User research professionals.
• ‘Usability Engineer’ returns 4K people only, Might have scored much higher 10 years back. Looks like, companies do not hire “Usability Engineers’ anymore J
• Similarly, observe the numbers for this set: User experience Designer, User experience Design, and User Experience. User experience looks like one of the most popular term to have for sure. But once it comes to User Experience Designer role, the number drops drastically to 42K worldwide, 22K in US, and 2.7 K in India. User experience is a ‘nice to have’ word in your profile, (2800 K) but number of practitioners is less than 50K.

• Interestingly UX abbreviation of the term User Experience is also equally popular, at 142 K.

Anyways, here is the whole Data looks like:

Anyways it was fun playing with the numbers..

Any thoughts?