Yesterday Mircea and I were visiting Liverpool for our first UXLiverpool meetup and wow, it was very good, 17 people from different backgrounds learning and discussing about user experience and experience desig.

How was it?

The main part of the meeting was covered by Ian Walker talk about Key Project Processes for the whole team, where he presented a very nice overview of the complete UX process and he detailed when and where we should involve other members of the team in the process.

As usual, the presentation lead to some very interesting debates and insights, and from my point of view, this is one of the key aspects of this kind of meetings: trying to extrapolate the information to your specific scenario, talking about your experiences applying different techniques, tips and tricks…

Some interesting topics where:

• How can we build a meaningful single persona for a really big site like amazon.com?
• Tip: rather than spending time arguing about what specific implementation is better, is usually better to do A/B testing — and that can be real A/B or even just paper prototypes!
• If your app is an Facebook app, you can get really interesting feedback directly from the users — ask, start a conversation or just look what are writing :-)

Anything else?

Yeah! the second interesting topic someone raised was about ‘How to deal with designers’ in the way that sometimes, a process that starts with a low quality wireframe can suffer severe changes when applying the current visual guidelines.

There are no magic bullets to solve this, but only trying to explain and involve more people in UX tasks, so they can realise the whole user experience can be affected, and any visual element should help the final user.

### Should I go to the next one?

Sure! Please have a look at the meetup UXLiverpool page, follow them on twitter and join us next time :-)