From Users to Innovators: Making the Case for Lead UX in IS

This viewpoint article argues that Information Systems (IS) professionals must evolve their design practices to effectively harness insights from user-generated content (UGC). While participatory and user-centered design remain foundational, they struggle to scale and anticipate emerging needs in today’s dynamic digital ecosystems. We introduce the Lead UX framework, which integrates von Hippel’s lead user theory with data-analytic approaches to systematically identify both innovation-driving lead users and key emergent lead topics within large-scale user discussions. By combining automated topic modeling and related natural language processing techniques with expert human review, Lead UX enables IS professionals to transform overwhelming volumes of UGC into actionable intelligence for proactive, innovation-driven design. We outline a hybrid workflow for operationalizing Lead UX, address challenges such as data quality and analytic bias, and propose future research directions, including comparative case studies, practitioner assessments, and algorithmic benchmarking. Finally, we offer actionable recommendations for educators and practitioners on embedding Lead UX into curricula and development processes, positioning users as co-designers in continuous IS innovation.