It’s extreme, its epic it’s got polarbears… it’s the UX Challenge conference in the Arctic! Looks almost fun.

There is a short post on Boing Boing by Clay Shirky describing very informal user testing equipment & process at Meetup a web service to help people organise gatherings. The post doesn’t go into enough detail for me but explains that they are testing their service with at least one user every day.

I asked Scott how often they did that sort of thing. “Every day” came the reply.(Meetup) have made it possible to take Jacob Nielsen’s user-testing advice — “Test with five users” — and add “…every week.” Obstacles to getting real feedback are now mainly cultural, not technological; any business that isn’t learning from their users doesn’t want to learn from their users.

He also references a post by Mark Hurst that introduces “a very simple measurement that gets to the heart of what customer-centered business is all about”, the TESLA

Tesla stands for “time elapsed since labs attended.” In other words, your Tesla is how long it’s been since you’ve spent time directly observing customers as they use your product or service.

Karl Popper argued that simple theories are preferable “because their empirical content is greater; and because they are better testable.”

Would the same be true of user interface?

Just a quick link to some software developed by some folk over at Microsoft that looks pretty interesting. The software developed by “Julie and Sumit” allows you to affinity diagram on your screen. The really cool thing is that it lets you export your data in CSV, but also lets you import CSV’s.

This is all part of the Microsoft office labs experimental set of tools. It’s good to see MS use the lab concept to build a bunch of neat prototypes and monitor how people use them, A great idea for gathering information on new products / features to put into future releases of office.

Generic Work Process : “This toolkit offers an overview of the methods and techniques which can be used throughout the user-centered design process.”

How do you design? : PDf draft of a book looking at 100+ different designer’s processes. “Our processes determine the quality of our products. If we wish to improve our products, we must improve our processes; we must continually redesign not just our products but also the way we design. That’s why we study the design process. To know what we do and how we do it. To understand it and improve it. To become better designers.”

The first suggests to me that the design process has been solved and commoditised, the second while warning against ad hoc design processes suggests there are many very different models and that ongoing process evaluation and improvment is essential.