Our first webinar went off fairly well and we received some kind feedback from participants. Whitney Hess was kind enough to tweet the event, and those tweets became the catalyst for a company to wake up to change it needed to make. In the webinar, Modern Web Form Design with Luke Wroblewski, Luke critiques and even shows a redesign of the Boingo sign up form, and even though he’s blogged this before I guess Boingo hadn’t seen it. But apparently they were following Whitney on Twitter (as are like a gagillion other people) because during the session they DM’d her to ask if she would ask Luke to contact them about improving their site. It’s nice to know Luke’s effort has paid off in education and in redesign!

Posted 18 November 2008

Following the recent Business Model Design workshop taught by Alex Osterwalder, we asked participants Would you recommend this class to a friend? Every person who responded said yes, the highest approval we’ve had for any workshop (including, um, mine).

Alex continues to teach and write on the topic of business models, so there’s plenty of opportunity to learn from him. Here’s a few comments from the workshop participants:

• “It’s good to see that someone finally dissected the components of a business model. Alex did it in a good way that will enable us to understand the implications of changes we are thinking about.”
• “I like the business model framework as a tool that I will be able to use in my work. Exercises were very helpful.”
• “I was able to take away practical knowledge that I could apply to my own work and I can think of a couple of clients in my practice who can benefit from it.”

Posted 30 October 2008

I’m happy to announce the launch of Future Practice Webinars that Smart Experience is producing in partnership with Rosenfeld Media. Here’s the first two:

• November 13 (1-2pm EST): Modern Web Form Design with Luke Wroblewski. [details/register]
• December 11 (1-2pm EST): Using Mental Models for Tactics and Strategy with Indi Young. [details/register]

Why webinars? Well, there’s a few reasons.

1. Ever since I started Smart Experience I’ve heard from people around the world that they want this education where they are, so this is one channel to help them get it.
2. Whether we’re in good economic times or the current lousy situation, less expensive products make sense, and we can offer webinars less expensively than in-person classes.
3. They’re better for the environment than all students emitting carbon in order to convene in one place, and I just can’t ignore that aspect of doing business any longer.
4. As our world becomes more complex, the tactical and the strategic bleed together. If you look at something like an e-commerce website you’ll see the business model, e-commerce functionality, and interaction design have to reflect one another, and practitioners need to understand that whole system. We call this service Future Practice Webinars because they address both tactics and strategy for the practitioner.

Posted 29 October 2008

We posted a preview of our first Smart Pill video a while ago, and then when we finished it we showed it to a select group of beta testers. We set up a SurveyMonkey page to keep their feedback anonymous and let them download a free copy as compensation.

The feedback was so useful I wanted to share highlights here in case it helps others who are creating similar screencasts and video tutorials. Here’s what they liked and how many times it was mentioned:

• Rich use of images as examples (6)
• Narration (5)
• Structure and agenda (4)
• Research and history (2)
• Pace (1)
• Photos of people (1)

Here’s some of the suggestions they made for improving it:

• Show more examples of solutions for each exercise. (5) One person had the great idea of asking people to post and tag their solutions for others to see.
• Prominently show the total duration of the video (2)
• Include a photo or video of the narrator (2)

Now we just need to do a few revs before it’s ready for sale.

Posted 27 October 2008

Our friends at Namahn in Brussels offer a novel approach to teaching design: the Masterclass. It consists of two full days of intensive study starting with field research and running all the way through to design specs. Soup to nuts, as we say in the U.S. While this is a lot of technique to cover in only two days, I imagine seeing everything done in a compressed timeframe builds a thorough understanding of the process, an understanding it took me years of practice to arrive at.

I imagine it also illustrates the breadth of technique of this one studio, so instead of just learning theory the student gets a great perspective into how a professional service firm like this performs client work.

Posted 29 August 2008