Peter Van Dijck, the well-known information architect formerly of New York and now of Belgium, asks, “If conferences are all about the people, shouldn’t conference sites be more like social network sites?”
Indeed, we could ask the same question of schools. My answer is an emphatic Yes, which is why the majority of the site here at Smart Experience is a wiki.
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:
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:
Why webinars? Well, there’s a few reasons.
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:
Here’s some of the suggestions they made for improving it:
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