I want to thank everyone who made it to last week’s meetup! It was a great success. Special thanks to Leo Zhang, organizer of the Learn UX Seattle Meetup, for bringing their event to the Fresh offices and inviting us to join the conversation.

The audience was very engaged and asked a lot of great questions about UX. In fact, Leo remarked that he had never seen that level of discussion at a meetup. Many attendees reported that they learned something new and useful to their UX career.

I spoke about UX testing methods and gave examples of using each method from various projects.  At Fresh, we incorporate testing to inform and validate our design work. Testing should reduce risk, reduce cost, and/or improve the product. So, the types and quantity of testing we recommend depend on the context of the project, the business case, and the nature of the problem being solved.

Jeff spoke about Fresh’s 3-step innovation process – ideate, collaborate, evaluate – as well as our internal innovation platform, Invent Value. Fresh uses Invent Value to crowdsource and develop ideas for clients and internal projects. For example, our team completed 10 Invent Value challenges where we did UX reviews on applications for one of our larger clients in the last month. On a lighter note, we used Invent Value to name the conference rooms in our new office last year. After ideating individually and collaborating to expand on the ideas, we upvoted names for places where ideas are born, like The Laboratory and The Factory.